Presented to U.N. High Commissioner
for Human Rights Mary Robinson at the World Conference Against
Racism in Durban, South Africa by the members of the Congressional
Black Caucus attending the conference: Donna Christianson, John
Conyers, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Barbara Lee, Sheila Jackson Lee,
Cynthia McKinney, and Diane Watson, September 1, 2001.

from the Internet

Overview

We're here to talk about the FBI and U.S.
democracy because here we have this peculiar situation that we
live in a democratic country - everybody knows that, everybody
says it, it's repeated, it's dinned into our ears a thousand times,
you grow up, you pledge allegiance, you salute the flag, you hail
democracy, you look at the totalitarian states, you read the history
of tyrannies, and here is the beacon light of democracy. And,
of course, there's some truth to that. There are things you can
do in the United States that you can't do many other places without
being put in jail.

But the United States is a very complex
system. It's very hard to describe because, yes, there are elements
of democracy; there are things that you're grateful for, that
you're not in front of the death squads in El Salvador. On the
other hand, it's not quite a democracy. And one of the things
that makes it not quite a democracy is the existence of outfits
like the FBI and the CIA. Democracy is based on openness, and
the existence of a secret policy, secret lists of dissident citizens,
violates the spirit of democracy.

Despite its carefully contrived image
as the nation's premier crime fighting agency, the Federal Bureau
of Investigation has always functioned primarily as America's
political police. This role includes not only the collection of
intelligence on the activities of political dissidents and groups,
but often times, counterintelligence operations to thwart those
activities. The techniques employed are easily recognized by anyone
familiar with military psychological operations. The FBI, through
the use of the criminal justice system, the postal system, the
telephone system and the Internal Revenue Service, enjoys an operational
capability surpassing even that of the CIA, which conducts covert
actions in foreign countries without having access to those institutions.

Although covert operations have been employed
throughout FBI history, the formal COunter INTELligence PROgrams
(COINTELPRO's) of the period 1956-1971 were the first to be both
broadly targeted and centrally directed. According to FBI researcher
Brian Glick, "FBI headquarters set policy, assessed progress,
charted new directions, demanded increased production, and carefully
monitored and controlled day-to-day operations. This arrangement
required that national COINTELPRO supervisors and local FBI field
offices communicate back and forth, at great length, concerning
every operation. They did so quite freely, with little fear of
public exposure. This generated a prolific trail of bureaucratic
paper. The moment that paper trail began to surface, the FBI discontinued
all of its formal domestic counterintelligence programs. It did
not, however, cease its covert political activity against U.S.
dissidents." 1

Of roughly 20,000 people investigated
by the FBI solely on the basis of their political views between
1956-1971, about 10 to 15% were the targets of active counterintelligence
measures per se. Taking counterintelligence in its broadest sense,
to include spreading false information, it's estimated that about
two-thirds were COINTELPRO targets. Most targets were never suspected
of committing any crime.

The nineteen sixties were a period of
social change and unrest. Color television brought home images
of jungle combat in Vietnam and protesters and priests burning
draft cards and American flags. In the spring and summer months
of 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967 and 1968, massive black rebellions swept
across almost every major US city in the Northeast, Midwest and
California. 2 Presidents Johnson and Nixon, and many others feared
violent revolution and denounced the protesters. President Kennedy
had felt the opposite: "Those who make peaceful revolution
impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

The counterculture of the sixties, and
the FBI's reaction to it, were in many ways a product of the 1950s,
the so-called "Age of McCarthyism." John Edgar Hoover,
longtime Director of the FBI, was a prominent spokesman of the
anti-communist paranoia of the era:

The forces which are most anxious to weaken
our internal security are not always easy to identify. Communists
have been trained in deceit and secretly work toward the day when
they hope to replace our American way of life with a Communist
dictatorship. They utilize cleverly camouflaged movements, such
as peace groups and civil rights groups to achieve their sinister
purposes. While they as individuals are difficult to identify,
the Communist party line is clear. Its first concern is the advancement
of Soviet Russia and the godless Communist cause. It is important
to learn to know the enemies of the American way of life. 3

Throughout the 1960s, Hoover consistently
applied this theory to a wide variety of groups, on occasion reprimanding
agents unable to find "obvious" communist connections
in civil rights and anti-war groups. 4 During the entire COINTELPRO
period, no links to Soviet Russia were uncovered in any of the
social movements disrupted by the FBI.

The commitment of the FBI to undermine
and destroy popular movements departing from political orthodoxy
has been extensive, and apparently proportional to the strength
and promise of such movements, as one would expect in the case
of the secret police organization of any state, though it is doubtful
that there is anything comparable to this record among the Western
industrial democracies.

In retrospect, the COINTEPRO's of the
1960s were thoroughly successful in achieving their stated goals,
"to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize"
the enemies of the State.

Victimization

The most serious of the FBI disruption
programs were those directed against "Black Nationalists."
Agents were instructed to undertake actions to discredit these
groups both within "the responsible Negro community"
and to "Negro radicals," also "to the white community,
both the responsible community and to `liberals' who have vestiges
of sympathy for militant black nationalists simply because they
are Negroes..."

A March 4th, 1968 memo from J Edgar Hoover
to FBI field offices laid out the goals of the COINTELPRO - Black
Nationalist Hate Groups program: "to prevent the coalition
of militant black nationalist groups;" "to prevent the
rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant black
nationalist movement;" "to prevent violence on the part
of black nationalist groups;" "to prevent militant black
nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability;"
and "to prevent the long-range growth of militant black nationalist
organizations, especially among youth." Included in the program
were a broad spectrum of civil rights and religious groups; targets
included Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge
Cleaver, and Elijah Muhammad.

A top secret Special Report 5 for President
Nixon, dated June 1970 gives some insight into the motivation
for the actions undertaken by the government to destroy the Black
Panther party. The report describes the party as "the most
active and dangerous black extremist group in the United States."
Its "hard-core members" were estimated at about 800,
but "a recent poll indicates that approximately 25 per cent
of the black population has a great respect for the BPP, incuding
43 per cent of blacks under 21 years of age." On the basis
of such estimates of the potential of the party, counterintelligence
operations were carried out to ensure that it did not succeed
in organizing as a substantial social or political force.

Another memorandum explains the motivation
for the FBI operations against student protesters: "the movement
of rebellious youth known as the 'New Left,' involving and influencing
a substantial number of college students, is having a serious
impact on contemporary society with a potential for serious domestic
strife." The New Left has "revolutionary aims"
and an "identification with Marxism-Leninism." It has
attempted "to infiltrate and radicalize labor," and
after failing "to subvert and control the mass media"
has established "a large network of underground publications
which serve the dual purpose of an internal communication network
and an external propaganda organ." Its leaders have "openly
stated their sympathy with the international communist revolutionary
movements in South Vietnam and Cuba; and have directed others
into activities which support these movements."

The effectiveness of the state disruption
programs is not easy to evaluate. Black leaders estimate the significance
of the programs as substantial. Dr. James Turner of Cornell University,
former president of the African Heritage Studies Association,
assessed these programs as having "serious long-term consequences
for black Americans," in that they "had created in blacks
a sense of depression and hopelessness." 6

He states that "the F.B.I. set out
to break the momentum developed in black communities in the late
fifties and early sixties"; "we needed to put together
organizational mechanisms to deliver services," but instead,
"our ability to influence things that happen to us internally
and externally was killed." He concludes that "the lack
of confidence and paranoia stimulated among black people by these
actions" is just beginning to fade.

The American Indian Movement, arguably
the most hopeful vehicle for indigenous pride and self-determination
in the late 20th century, was also destroyed. As AIM leader Dennis
Banks has observed:

"The FBI's tactics eventually proved
successful in a peculiar sort of way. It's remarkable under the
circumstances - and a real testament to the inner strength of
the traditional Oglalas - that the feds were never really able
to divide them from us, to have the traditionals denouncing us
and working against us. But, in the end, the sort of pressure
the FBI put on people on the reservation, particularly the old
people, it just wore 'em down. A kind of fatigue set in. With
the firefight at Oglala, and all the things that happened after
that, it was easy to see we weren't going to win by direct confrontation.
So the traditionals asked us to disengage, to try and take some
of the heaviest pressure off. And, out of respect, we had no choice
but to honor those wishes. And that was the end of AIM, at least
in the way it had been known up till then. The resistance is still
there, of course, and the struggle goes on, but the movement itself
kind of disappeared." 7

The same can be said for socialist movements
targeted by COINTELPRO. Alone among the parliamentary democracies,
the United States has no mass-based socialist party, however mild
and reformist, no socialist voice in the media, and virtually
no departure from Keynesian economics in American universities
and journals. The people of the United States have paid dearly
for the enforcement of domestic privilege and the securing of
imperial domains. The vast waste of social wealth, miserable urban
ghettos, the threat and reality of unemployment, meaningless work
in authoritarian institutions, standards of health and social
welfare that should be intolerable in a society with such vast
productive resources -- all of this must be endured and even welcomed
as the "price of freedom" if the existing order is to
stand without challenge.

COINTELPRO Techniques

From its inception, the FBI has operated
on the doctrine that the "preliminary stages of organization
and preparation" must be frustrated, well before there is
any clear and present danger of "revolutionary radicalism."

At its most extreme dimension, political
dissidents have been eliminated outright or sent to prison for
the rest of their lives. There are quite a number of individuals
who have been handled in that fashion.

Many more, however, were "neutralized"
by intimidation, harassment, discrediting, snitch jacketing, a
whole assortment of authoritarian and illegal tactics.

Neutralization, as explained on record
by the FBI, doesn't necessarily pertain to the apprehension of
parties in the commission of a crime, the preparation of evidence
against them, and securing of a judicial conviction, but rather
to simply making them incapable of engaging in political activity
by whatever means.

For those not assessed as being in themselves,
necessarily a security risk, but engaged in what the Bureau views
to be politically objectionable activity, those techniques might
consist of disseminating derogatory information to the target's
family, friends and associates, visiting and questioning them,
basically, making it clear that the FBI are paying attention to
them, to try to intimidate them.

If the subject continues their activities,
and particularly if they respond by escalating them, the FBI will
escalate its tactics as well. Maybe they'll be arrested and prosecuted
for spurious reasons. Maybe there will be more vicious rumors
circulated about them. False information may be planted in the
press. The targets' efforts to speak in public are frustrated,
employers may be contacted to try to get them fired. Anonymous
letters have been sent by the FBI to targets' spouses, accusing
them of infidelity. Others have contained death threats.

And if the subject persists then there
will be a further escalation.

According to FBI memoranda of the 1960s,
"Key black activists" were repeatedly arrested "on
any excuse" until "they could no longer make bail."
The FBI made use of informants, often quite violent and emotionally
disturbed individuals, to present false testimony to the courts,
to frame COINTELPRO targets for crimes they knew they did not
commit. In some cases the charges were quite serious, including
murder.

Another option is "snitch jacketing"
- making the target look like a police informant or a CIA agent.
This serves the dual purposes of isolating and alienating important
leaders, and increasing the general level of fear and factionalism
in the group.

"Black bag jobs" are burglaries
performed in order to obtain the written materials, mailing lists,
position papers, and internal documents of an organization or
an individual. At least 10,000 American homes have been subjected
to illegal breaking and entering by the FBI, without judicial
warrants.

Group membership lists are used to expand
the operation. Anonymous mailings of newspaper and magazine articles
may be mailed to group members and supporters to convince them
of the error of their ways. Anonymous or spurious letters and
cartoons are sent to promote factionalism and widen rifts in or
between organizations.

According to the FBI's own records, agents
have been directed to use "established local news media contacts"
and other "sources available to the Seat of Government"
to "disrupt or neutralize" organizations and to "ridicule
and discredit" them.

Many counterintelligence techniques involve
the use of paid informants. Informants become agents provocateurs
by raising controversial issues at meetings to take advantage
of ideological divisions, by promoting emnity with other groups,
or by inciting the group to violent acts, even to the point of
providing them with weapons.

Over the years, FBI provocateurs have
repeatedly urged and initiated violent acts, including forceful
disruptions of meetings and demonstrations, attacks on police,
bombings, and so on, following an old strategy of Tsarist police
director TC Zubatov: "We shall provoke you to acts of terror
and then crush you."

A concise description of political warfare
is given in a passage from a CIA paper entitled "Nerve War
Against Individuals," referring to the overthrowing of the
government of Guatemala in 1954:

The strength of an enemy consists largely
of the individuals who occupy key positions in the enemy organization,
as leaders, speakers, writers, organizers, cabinet members, senior
government officials, army commanders and staff officers, and
so forth. Any effort to defeat the enemy must therefore concentrate
to a great extent upon these key enemy individuals.

If such an effort is made by means short
of physical violence, we call it "psychological warfare."
If it is focussed less upon convincing those individuals by logical
reasoning, but primarily upon moving them in the desired direction
by means of harassment, by frightening, confusing and misleading
them, we speak of a "nerve war". 8

The COINTELPROs clearly met the above
definition of "nerve wars," and, in the case of the
American Indian Movement in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, the FBI
conducted a full-fledged counterinsurgency war, complete with
death squads, disappearances and assassinations, recalling Guatemala
in more recent years.

The full story of COINTELPRO may never
be told. The Bureau's files were never seized by Congress or the
courts or sent to the National Archives. Some have been destroyed.
Many counterintelligence operations were never committed to writing
as such, or involve open investigations, and ex-operatives are
legally prohibited from talking about them. Most operations remain
secret until long after the damage has been done.

Murder and Assassination

Among the most remarkable of the COINTELPRO
revelations are those relating to the FBI's attempts to incite
gang warfare and murderous attacks on Black Panther leaders. For
example, a COINTELPRO memo from FBI Headquarters mailed November
25, 1968, informs recipient offices that:

a serious struggle is taking place between
the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the US [United Slaves] organization.
The struggle has reached such proportions that it is taking on
the aura of gang warfare with attendant threats of murder and
reprisals.

In order to fully capitalize upon BPP
and US differences as well as to exploit all avenues of creating
further dissension in the ranks of the BPP, recipient offices
are instructed to submit imaginative and hard-hitting counterintelligence
measures aimed at crippling the BPP. 9

According to the national chairman of
the US organization, who became a professor at San Diego State,
the US and the Panthers had been negotiating to avoid bloodshed:
"Then the F.B.I. stepped in and the shooting started."

A series of cartoons were produced in
an effort to incite violence between the Black Panther Party and
the US; for example, one showing Panther leader David Hilliard
hanging dead with a rope around his neck from a tree. The San
Diego office reported to the director that:

in view of the recent killing of BPP member
SYLVESTER BELL, a new cartoon is being considered in the hopes
that it will assist in the continuance of the rift between BPP
and US. This cartoon, or series of cartoons, will be similar in
nature to those formerly approved by the Bureau and will be forwarded
to the Bureau for evaluation and approval immediately upon their
completion.

Under the heading "TANGIBLE RESULTS"
the memo continues:

Shootings, beatings, and a high degree
of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast
San Diego. Although no specific counterintelligence action can
be credited with contributing to this over-all situation, it is
felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable
to this program.

One of the more dramatic incidents occurred
on the night of December 4, 1969, when Panther leaders Fred Hampton
and Mark Clark were shot to death by Chicago policemen in a predawn
raid on their apartment. Hampton, one of the most promising leaders
of the Black Panther party, was killed in bed, perhaps drugged.
Depositions in a civil suit in Chicago revealed that the chief
of Panther security and Hampton's personal bodyguard, William
O'Neal, was an FBI infiltrator. O'Neal gave his FBI contacting
agent, Roy Mitchell, a detailed floor plan of the apartment, which
Mitchell turned over to the state's attorney's office shortly
before the attack, along with "information" -- of dubious
veracity -- that there were two illegal shotguns in the apartment.
For his services, O'Neal was paid over $10,000 from January 1969
through July 1970, according to Mitchell's affidavit.

The availability of the floor plan presumably
explains why "all the police gunfire went to the inside corners
of the apartment, rather than toward the entrances," and
undermines still further the pretense that the barrage was caused
by confusion in unfamiliar surroundings that led the police to
believe, falsely, that they were being fired upon by the Panthers
inside. 10

Agent Mitchell was named by the Chicago
Tribune as head of the Chicago COINTELPRO directed against the
Black Panthers and other black groups. Whether or not this is
true, there is substantial evidence of direct FBI involvement
in this Gestapo-style political assassination. O'Neal continued
to report to Agent Mitchell after the raid, taking part in meetings
with the Hampton family and their discussion with their lawyers.

There has as yet been no systematic investigation
of the FBI campaign against the Black Panther Party in Chicago,
as part of its nationwide program against the Panthers.

Malcolm X was supposedly murdered by former
colleagues in the Nation of Islam (NOI) as a result of the faction-fighting
which had led to his splitting away from that movement, and their
"natural wrath" at his establishment of a separate mosque,
the Muslim Mosque, Inc.

However, the NOl factionalism at issue
didn't just happen. It had been developed by deliberate Bureau
actions, through infiltration and the "sparking of acrimonious
debates within the organization," rumor-mongering, and other
tactics designed to foster internal disputes. 11 The Chicago Special
Agent in Charge, Marlin Johnson, who also oversaw the assassinations
of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, makes it quite obvious that he
views the murder of Malcolm X as something of a model for "successful"
counterintelligence operations.

"Over the years considerable thought
has been given, and action taken with Bureau approval, relating
to methods through which the NOI could be discredited in the eyes
of the general black populace or through which factionalism among
the leadership could be created. Serious consideration has also
been given towards developing ways and means of changing NOI philosophy
to one whereby the members could be developed into useful citizens
and the organization developed into one emphasizing religion -
the brotherhood of mankind - and self improvement. Factional disputes
have been developed - most notable being Malcolm X Little."
12

In an internal FBI monograph dated September
1963 found that, given the scope of support it had attracted over
the preceding five years, civil rights agitation represented a
clear threat to "the established order" of the U.S.,
and that Martin Luther "King is growing in stature daily
as the leader among leaders of the Negro movement ... so goes
Martin Luther King, and also so goes the Negro movement in the
United States." This accorded well with COINTELPRO specialist
William C. Sullivan's view, committed to writing shortly after
King's landmark "I Have a Dream" speech during the massive
civil rights demonstration in Washington, D.C., on August 28 of
the same year:

We must mark [King] now, if we have not
before, as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this Nation
from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security
... it may be unrealistic to limit [our actions against King]
to legalistic proofs that would stand up in court or before Congressional
Committees.

The stated objective of the SCLC, and
the nature of its practical activities, was to organize for the
securing of black voting rights across the rural South, with an
eye toward the ultimate dismantlement of at least the most blatant
aspects of the southern U.S. system of segregation. Even this
seemingly innocuous agenda was, however, seen as a threat by the
FBI. In mid-September of 1957, FBI supervisor J.G. Kelly forwarded
a newspaper clipping describing the formation of the SCLC to the
Bureau's Atlanta field office - that city being the location of
SCLC headquarters - informing local agents, for reasons which
were never specified, the civil rights group was "a likely
target for communist infiltration," and that "in view
of the stated purpose of the organization you should remain alert
for public source information concerning it in connection with
the racial situation." 13

The Atlanta field office "looked
into" the matter and ultimately opened a COMINFIL (communist-inflitrated
group) investigation of the SCLC, apparently based on the fact
that a single SWP member, Lonnie Cross, had offered his services
as a clerk in the organization's main office. 14 By the end of
the first year of FBI scrutiny, in September of 1958, a personal
file had been opened on King himself, ostensibly because he had
been approached on the steps of a Harlem church in which he'd
delivered a guest sermon by black CP member Benjamin J. Davis.
15 By October 1960, as the SCLC call for desegregation and black
voting rights in the south gained increasing attention and support
across the nation, the Bureau began actively infiltrating organizational
meetings and conferences. 16

By July of 1961, FBI intelligence on the
group was detailed enough to recount that, while an undergraduate
at Atlanta's Morehouse College in 1948, King had been affiliated
with the Progressive Party, and that executive director Wyatt
Tee Walker had once subscribed to a CP newspaper, The Worker.
17

Actual counterintelligence operations
against King and the SCLC seem to have begun with a January 8,
1962 letter from Hoover to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy,
contending that the civil rights leader enjoyed a "close
relationship" with Stanley D. Levison, "a member of
the Communist Party, USA," and that Isadore Wofsy, "a
high ranking communist leader," had written a speech for
King. 18

On the night of March 15-16,1962, FBI
agents secretly broke into Levison's New York office and planted
a bug; a wiretap of his office phone followed on March 20. 19
Among the other things picked up by the surveillance was information
that Jack ODell, who also had an alleged "record of ties
to the Communist party," had been recommended by both King
and Levison to serve as an assistant to Wyatt Tee Walker. 20 Although
none of these supposed communist affiliations were ever substantiated,
it was on this basis that SCLC was targeted within the Bureau's
ongoing COINTELPRO-CP,USA, beginning with the planting of five
disinformational "news stories" concerning the organization's
"communist connections" on October 24, 1962. 21 By this
point, Martin Luther King's name had been placed in Section A
of the FBI Reserve Index, one step below those individuals registered
in the Security Index and scheduled to be rounded up and "preventively
detained" in the event of a declared national emergency;
Attorney General Kennedy had also authorized round-the-clock surveillance
of all SCLC offices, as well as King's home. 22 Hence, by November
8,1963, comprehensive telephone taps had been installed at all
organizational offices, and King's residence. 23

By 1964, King was not only firmly established
as a preeminent civil rights leader, but was beginning to show
signs of pursuing a more fundamental structural agenda of social
change. Meanwhile, the Bureau continued its efforts to discredit
King, maintaining a drumbeat of mass media-distributed propaganda
concerning his supposed "communist influences" and sexual
proclivities, as well as triggering a spate of harassment by the
Internal Revenue Service (IRS). 24 When it was announced on October
14 of that year that King would receive a Nobel Peace Prize as
a reward for his work in behalf of the rights of American blacks,
the Bureau - exhibiting a certain sense of desperation - dramatically
escalated its efforts to neutralize him.

Two days after announcement of the impending
award, COINTELPRO specialist William Sullivan caused a composite
audio tape to be produced, supposedly consisting of "highlights"
taken from the taps of King's phones and bugs placed in his various
hotel rooms over the preceding two years.

The result, prepared by FBI audio technician
John Matter, purported to demonstrate the civil rights leader
had engaged in a series of "orgiastic" trysts with prostitutes
and, thus, "the depths of his sexual perversion and depravity."
The finished tape was packaged, along with an accompanying anonymous
letter (prepared by Bureau Internal Security Supervisor Seymore
F. Phillips on Sullivan's instruction), informing King that the
audio material would be released to the media unless he committed
suicide prior to bestowal of the Nobel Prize.

King, look into your heart. You know you
are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes.
White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but
I am sure that they don't have one at this time that is any where
near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat
you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. ...

King, there is only one thing left for
you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which
to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason,
it has definite practical significant. You are done. There is
but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy,
abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation. [sic]. 25

Sullivan then instructed veteran COINTELPRO
operative Lish Whitson to fly to Miami with the package; once
there, Whitson was instructed to address the parcel and mail it
to the intended victim. 26 When King failed to comply with Sullivan's
anonymous directive that he kill himself, FBI Associate Director
Cartha D. "Deke" DeLoach attempted to follow through
with the threat to make the contents of the doctored tape public:

The Bureau Crime Records Division, headed
by DeLoach, initiated a major campaign to let newsmen know just
what the Bureau [claimed to have] on King. DeLoach personally
offered a copy of the King surveillance transcript to Newsweek
Washington bureau chief Benjamin Bradlee. Bradlee refused it,
and mentioned the approach to a Newsday colleague, Jay Iselin.
27

Bradlee's disclosure of what the FBI was
up to served to curtail the effectiveness of DeLoach's operation,
and Bureau propagandists consequently found relatively few takers
on this particular story. More, in the face of a planned investigation
of electronic surveillance by government agencies announced by
Democratic Missouri Senator Edward V. Long, J. Edgar Hoover was
forced to order the rapid dismantling of the electronic surveillance
coverage of both King and the SCLC, drying up much of the source
material upon which Sullivan and his COINTELPRO specialists depended
for "authenticity."

Still, the Bureau's counterintelligence
operations against King continued apace, right up to the moment
of the target's death by sniper fire on a Memphis hotel balcony
on April 4, 1968. 28 By 1969, "[FBI] efforts to 'expose'
Martin Luther King, Jr., had not slackened even though King had
been dead for a year." 29

Those seeking independence for Puerto
Rico were similarly attacked. The Bureau considered independentista
leader Juan Mari Bras' near-fatal heart attack during April of
1964 to have been brought on, at least in part, by an anonymous
counterintelligence letter:

[deleted] stated that MARI BRAS' heart
attack on April 21, 1964, was obviously brought on by strain and
overwork and opinioned that the anonymous letter certainly did
nothing to ease his tensions for he felt the effects of the letter
deeply. The source pointed out that with MARI BRAS' illness and
effects of the letter on the MPIPR leaders, that the organization's
activities had come to a near halt.

[paragraph deleted]

It is clear from the above that our anonymous
letter has seriously disrupted the MPIPR ranks and created a climate
of distrust and dissension from which it will take them some time
to recover. This particular technique has been outstandingly successful
and we shall be on the lookout to further exploit the achievements
in this field. The Bureau will be promptly advised of other positive
results of this program that may come to our attention. 30

The pattern remained evident more than
a decade later when, after reviewing portions of the 75 volumes
of documents the FBI had compiled on him, Mari Bras testified
before the United Nations Commission on Decolonization:

[The documents] reflect the general activity
of the FBI toward the movement. But some of the memos are dated
1976 and 1977; long after COINTELPRO was [supposedly] ended as
an FBI activity ... At one point, there is a detailed description
of the death of my son, in 1976, at the hands of a gun-toting
assassin. The bottom of the memo is fully deleted, leaving one
to wonder who the assassin was. The main point, however, is that
the memo is almost joyful about the impact his death will have
upon me in my Gubernatorial campaign, as head of our party, in
1976. 31

When Mari Bras suffered from an attack
of severe depression the same year, the San Juan Special Agent
in Charge noted in a memo to FBI headquarters that, "It would
hardly be idle boasting to say that some of the Bureau's activities
have provoked the situation of Mari Bras." Given the context
established by the Bureau's own statements vis a vis Mari Bras,
it also seems quite likely that one of the means by which the
FBI continued to "exploit its achievements" in "provoking
the situation" of the independentista leader was to arrange
for the firebombing of his home in 1978.

Lethal COINTELPRO operations against the
independentistas continued well into the 1980s. As Alfredo Lopez
recounted in 1988:

[O]ver the past fifteen years, 170 attacks
- beatings, shootings, and bombings of independence organizations
and activists - have been documented ... there have been countless
attacks and beatings of people at rallies and pickets, to say
nothing of independentistas walking the streets. The 1975 bombing
of a rally at Mayaguez that killed two restaurant workers was
more dramatic, but like the other 170 attacks remains unsolved.
Although many right-wing organizations claimed credit for these
attacks, not one person has been arrested or brought to trial.
32

A clear instance of direct FBI involvement
in anti-independentista violence is the "Cerro Maravilla
Episode" of July 25,1978. On that date, two young activists,
Arnaldo Dario Rosado and Carlos Soto Arrivi, accompanied a provocateur
named Alejandro Gonzalez Malave, were lured into a trap and shot
to death by police near the mountain village. Official reports
claimed the pair had been on the way to blow up a television tower
near Cerro Maravilla, and had fired first when officers attempted
to arrest them. A taxi driver who was also on the scene, however,
adamantly insisted that this was untrue, that neither independentista
had offered resistance when captured, and that the police themselves
had fired two volleys of shots in order to make it sound from
a distance as if they'd been fired upon. "It was a planned
murder," the witness said, "and it was carried out like
that." What had actually happened became even more obvious
when a police officer named Julio Cesar Andrades came forward
and asserted that the assassination had been planned "from
on high" and in collaboration with the Bureau. This led to
confirmation of Gonzalez Molave's role as an infiltrator reporting
to both the local police and the FBI, a situation which prompted
him to admit "having planned and urged the bombing"
in order to set the two young victim up for execution. In the
end, it was shown that:

Dario and Soto [had] surrendered. Police
forced the men to their knees, handcuffed their arms behind their
backs, and as the two independentistas pleaded for justice, the
police tortured and murdered them. 33

None of the police and other officials
involved were ever convicted of the murders and crimes directly
involved in this affair. However, despite several years of systematic
coverup by the FBI and U.S. Justice Department, working in direct
collaboration with the guilty officers, ten of the latter were
finally convicted on multiple counts of perjury and sentenced
to prison terms ranging from six to 30 years apiece. Having evaded
legal responsibility for his actions altogether, provocateur Gonzalez
Molave was shot to death in front of his home on April 29,1986,
by "party or parties unknown." This was followed, on
February 28,1987, by the government's payment of $575,000 settlements
to both victims' families, a total of $1,150,000 in acknowledgment
of the official misconduct attending their deaths and the subsequent
investigation(s).

Despite tens of thousands of pages of
documentary evidence, the idea that the Bureau would utilize private
right-wing operatives and terrorists is a chilling, alien concept
to most Americans. Nevertheless, the FBI has financed, organized,
and supplied arms to right-wing groups that carried out fire-bombings,
burglaries, and shootings. 34

This was the case during the FBI's COINTELPRO
in South Dakota in the 1970's against the Oglala Sioux Nation
and the American Indian Movement. Right-wing vigilantes were used
to disrupt the American Indian Movement (AIM) and selectively
terrorize and murder the Oglala Sioux people 35, in what could
only be described as a counter-insurgency campaign. During the
36 months roughly beginning with the 1973 seige of Wounded Knee
and continuing through the first of May 1976, more than sixty
AIM members and supporters died violently on or in locations immediately
adjacent to the Pine Ridge Reservation. A minimum of 342 others
suffered violent physical assaults. As Roberto Maestas and Bruce
Johansen have observed:

Using only these documented political
deaths, the yearly murder rate on Pine Ridge Reservation between
March 1, 1973, and March 1, 1976, was 170 per 100,000. By comparison,
Detroit, the reputed "murder capital of the United States,"
had a rate of 20.2 in 1974. ... The political murder rate at Pine
Ridge between March 1, 1973, and March 1, 1976, was almost equivalent
to that in Chile during the three years after the military coup
supported by the United States deposed and killed President Salvador
Allende. 36

To commemorate the 1890 massacre of Wounded
Knee, in which 300 Minnecojou Lakota were slaughtered by the U.S.
Seventh Cavalry, hundreds of Native Americans from reservations
across the West gathered in Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation
in South Dakota, during the winter of 1972-73. 37

This situation was already tense due to
a series of unsolved murders on the reservation, and a struggle
between the administration of the Oglala Sioux tribal president,
Dick Wilson, and opposition organizations on the reservation,
including AIM. Wilson had been bestowed with a $62,000 Bureau
of Indian Affairs (BIA) grant for purposes of establishing a "tribal
ranger group" - an entity which designated itself as "Guardians
Of the OgIala Nation" (GOONs). Wilson's "goon squads"
patrolled the reservation, unleashing a reign of terror against
Wilson's enemies. When victims attempted to seek the protection
of the BIA police, they quickly discovered that perhaps a third
of its roster - including its head, Delmar Eastman (Crow), and
his second-in-command, Duane Brewer (OgIala) - were doubling as
GOON leaders or members. For their part, BIA officials - who had
set the whole thing up - consistently turned aside requests for
assistance from the traditionals as being "purely internal
tribal matters," beyond the scope of BIA authority.

On Feb 28th, 1973, residents of Wounded
Knee, South Dakota found the roads to the hamlet blockaded by
GOONs, later reinforced by marshals service Special Operations
Group (SOG) teams and FBI personnel. By 10 p.m., Minneapolis SAC
Joseph Trimbach had flown in to assume personal command of the
GOONs and BIA police, while Wayne Colburn, director of the U.S.
Marshals Service, had arrived to assume control over his now reinforced
SOG unit. Colonel Volney Warner of the 82nd Airborne Division
and 6th Army Colonel Jack Potter - operating directly under General
Alexander Haig, military liaison in the Nixon White House - had
also been dispatched from the Pentagon as "advisors"
coordinating a flow of military personnel, weapons and equipment
to those besieging Wounded Knee. As Rex Weyler has noted:

Documents later subpoenaed from the Pentagon
revealed that Colonel Potter directed the employment of 17 APCs
[armored personnel carriers], 130,000 rounds of M-16 ammunition,
41,000 rounds of M-40 high explosive, as well as helicopters,
Phantom jets, and personnel. Military officers, supply sergeants,
maintenance technicians, chemical officers, and medical teams
remained on duty throughout the 71 day siege, all working in civilian
clothes [to conceal their unconstitutional involvement in this
"civil disorder"]. 38

On March 5, Dick Wilson - with federal
officials present - held a press conference to declare "open
season" on AIM members on Pine Ridge, declaring "AIM
will die at Wounded Knee." For their part, those inside the
hamlet announced their intention to remain where they were until
such time as Wilson was removed from office, the GOONs disbanded,
and the massive federal presence withdrawn.

Beginning on March 13, federal forces
directed fire from heavy .50 caliber machineguns into the AIM
positions. The following month was characterized by alternating
periods of negotiation, favored by the army and the marshals -
which the FBI and GOONs did their best to subvert - and raging
gun battles when the latter held sway. Several defenders were
severely wounded in a firefight on March 17, and on March 23 some
20,000 more rounds were fired into Wounded Knee in a 24-hour period.

The FBI's "turf battle" with
the "soft" elements of the federal government rapidly
came to a head. On April 23, Chief U.S. Marshal Colburn and federal
negotiator Kent Frizzell were detained at a GOON roadblock and
a gun pointed at Frizzell's head. By his own account, Frizzell
was saved only after Colburn leveled a weapon at the GOON and
said, "Go ahead and shoot Frizzell, but when you do, you're
dead." The pair were then released. Later the same day, a
furious Colburn returned with several of his men, disarmed and
arrested eleven GOONs, and dismantled the roadblock. However,
"that same night... some of Wilson's people put it up again.
The FBI, still supporting the vigilantes, had [obtained the release
of those arrested and] supplied them with automatic weapons."
The GOONs were being armed by the FBI with fully automatic M-16
assault rifles, apparently limitless quantifies of ammunition,
and state-of-the-art radio communications gear. When Colburn again
attempted to dismantle the roadblock:

FBI [operations consultant] Richard [G.]
Held arrived by helicopter to inform the marshals that word had
come from a high Washington source to let the roadblock stand
... As a result the marshals were forced to allow several of Wilson's
people to be stationed at the roadblock and to participate in
... patrols around the village. 39

On the evening of April 26, the marshals
reported that they were taking automatic weapons fire from behind
their position, undoubtedly from GOON patrols. The same "party
or parties unknown" was also pumping bullets into the AIM/ION
positions in front of the marshals, a matter which caused return
fire from AIM. The marshals were thus caught in a crossfire. At
dawn on the 27th, the marshals, unnerved at being fired on all
night from both sides, fired tear gas cannisters from M-79 grenade
launchers into the AIM/ION bunkers. They followed up with some
20,000 rounds of small arms ammunition. AIM member Buddy Lamont
(Oglala), driven from a bunker by the gas, was hit by automatic
weapons fire and bled to death before medics, pinned down by the
barrage, could reach him.

When the siege finally ended through a
negotiated settlement on May 7, 1973, the AIM casualty count stood
at two dead and fourteen seriously wounded. An additional eight-to-twelve
individuals had been "disappeared" by the GOONs. They
were in all likelihood murdered and - like an untold number of
black civil rights workers in the swamps of Mississippi and Louisiana
- their bodies secretly buried somewhere in the remote vastness
of the reservation.

Of the 60-plus murders occurring in an
area in which the FBI held "preeminent jurisdiction,"
not one was solved by the Bureau. In most instances, no active
investigation was ever opened, despite eye-witnesses identifying
members of the Wilson GOON squad as killers.

U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Gerald Heaney,
after reviewing numerous court transcripts and FBI documents,
concluded that the United States Government overreacted at Wounded
Knee. Instead of carefully considering the legitimate grievances
of Native Americans, the response was essentially a military one.

While Judge Heaney believed that the "Native
Americans" had some culpability in the firefight that day,
he concluded the United States must share the responsibility.
It never has. The FBI has never been held accountable or even
publicly investigated for what one Federal petit jury and Judge
Heaney concluded was complicity in the creation of a climate of
fear and terror on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Other AIM casualties include Richard Oaks,
leader of the 1970 occupation of Alcatraz Island by "Indians
of All Tribes," who was gunned down in California the following
year. Larray Cacuse, a Navajo AIM leader, was shot to death in
Arizona in 1972. In 1979, AIM leader John Trudell, preparing to
make a speech in Washington, was told by FBI personnel that, if
he gave the speech, there would be "consequences." Trudell
not only made his speech, calling for the U.S. to get out of North
America and detailing the nature of federal repression in Indian
country, he burned a U.S. flag as well. That night, his wife,
mother-in-law, and three children were "mysteriously"
burned to death at their home on the Duck Valley Reservation in
Nevada.

Agents Provocateurs

Many details are now available concerning
these extensive campaigns of terror and disruption, in part through
right-wing paramilitary groups organized and financed by the national
government, but primarily through the much more effective means
of infiltration and provocation of existing groups. In particular,
much of the violence that occurred on college campuses can be
attributed to government provocateurs.

The Alabama branch of the ACLU argued
in court that in May 1970 an FBI agent "committed arson and
other violence that police used as a reason for declaring that
university students were unlawfully assembled" -- 150 students
were arrested. The court ruled that the agent's role was irrelevant
unless the defense could establish that he was instructed to commit
the violent acts, but this was impossible, according to defense
counsel, since the FBI and police thwarted his efforts to locate
the agent who had admitted the acts to him. 40

William Frapolly, who surfaced as a government
informer in the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial, an active member
of student and off-campus peace groups in Chicago, "during
an antiwar rally at his college, ... grabbed the microphone from
the college president and wrestled him off the stage" and
"worked out a scheme for wrecking the toilets in the college
dorms...as an act of antiwar protest." 41

One FBI provocateur resigned when he was
asked to arrange the bombing of a bridge in such a way that the
person who placed the booby-trapped bomb would be killed. This
was in Seattle, where it was revealed that FBI infiltrators had
been engaged in a campaign of arson, terrorism, and bombings of
university and civic buildings, and where the FBI arranged a robbery,
entrapping a young black man who was paid $75 for the job and
killed in a police ambush. 42

In another case, an undercover operative
who had formed and headed a pro-Communist Chinese organization
"at the direction of the bureau" reports that at the
Miami Republican convention he incited "people to turn over
one of the buses and then told them that if they really wanted
to blow the bus up, to stick a rag in the gas tank and light it."
They were unable to overturn the vehicle. 43

The Ku Klux Klan

During the 1960's, the FBI's role was
not to protect civil rights workers, but rather, through the use
of informants, the Bureau actively assisted the Ku Klux Klan in
their campaign of racist murder and terror.

Church Committee hearings and internal
FBI documents revealed that more than one quarter of all active
Klan members during the period were FBI agents or informants.
44 However, Bureau intelligence "assets" were neither
neutral observers nor objective investigators, but active participants
in beatings, bombings and murders that claimed the lives of some
50 civil rights activists by 1964. 44

Bureau spies were elected to top leadership
posts in at least half of all Klan units. 45 Needless to say,
the informants gained positions of organizational trust on the
basis of promoting the Klan's fascist agenda. Incitement to violence
and participation in terrorist acts would only confirm the infiltrator's
loyalty and commitment.

Unlike slick Hollywood popularizations
of the period, such as Alan Parker's film, "Mississippi Burning,"
the FBI was instrumental in building the Ku Klux Klan in the South,

"...setting up dozens of Klaverns,
sometimes being leaders and public spokespersons. Gary Rowe, an
FBI informant, was involved in the Klan killing of Viola Liuzzo,
a civil rights worker. He claimed that he had to fire shots at
her rather than 'blow his cover.' One FBI agent, speaking at a
rally organized by the Klavern he led, proclaimed to his followers,
'We will restore white rights if we have to kill every negro to
do it.'" 46

Throughout its history, the Klan has had
a contradictory relationship with the national government: as
a defender of white privilege and the patriarchal status quo,
and as an implicit threat, however provisional, to federal power.
Depending on political conditions in society as a whole, vigilante
terror can be supplemental to official violence, or kept on the
proverbial shortleash. 47 As a surrogate army in the field of
terror against official enemies, the Klan enjoys wide latitude.
But when it moves into an oppositional mode and attacks key institutions
of national power, Klan paramilitarism - but not its overt white
supremacist ideology - is treated as an imminent threat to the
social order, suppressed, but never destroyed, unlike other COINTELPRO
target groups.

These roles are not mutually exclusive.
As anti-racist researcher Michael Novick warns: "The KKK
and its successor and fraternal organizations are deeply rooted
in the actual white supremacist power relations of US society.
They exist as a supplement to the armed power of the state, available
to be used when the rulers and the state find it necessary."
48

The Klan's "supplemental" role,
particularly as a private armed force sporadically deployed to
arrest the development of movements for Black freedom, is best
considered by comparison to other Bureau operations. Unlike other
COINTELPROs, the "Klan - White Hate Groups" program
was of a different order entirely. Senior FBI management and a
majority of agents in the field endorsed the Klan's values, if
not the vigilante character of their tactics; from militaristic
anti-communism to extreme racial hatred; from ultra-nationalism
to misogynist puritanism. 49

This was evident during the civil rights
struggles of the sixties, when Freedom Riders and local community
activists directly confronted hostile police forces - many of
whom were openly allied with the Klan. Despite clear jurisdictional
authority to enforce federal law, the FBI consistently refused
to protect civil rights workers under attack across the South.
More than once, the Bureau refused to warn those under imminent
threat of violence.

FBI inaction in the area of civil rights
enforcement wasn't simply a matter of what the Pike Committee
of the House of Representatives dubbed "FBI racism."
Rather, FBI bureaucratic lethargy, when it came to protecting
Black lives, underscored its mission against subversion for constituents
whose privileges and power were threatened by a militant movement
for Black rights. 50

Strikingly different from anti-communist
COINTELPROs that enmeshed broad social sectors in a web of entanglements,
FBI monitoring of the Klan was strictly confined to the organization
itself. No serious efforts were made to explore the supplemental
role of White Citizens' Councils, many of which were active Klan
fronts, let alone investigate the obvious and widespread police
complicity in racist violence. 51 Bureau surveillance of the Klan
was purely passive, hardly the directed aggression reserved for
left-wing targets.

In May, 1961, as civil rights activists
turned up the heat, the FBI passed information to the Klan about
Freedom Rider buses on their way to Birmingham, Alabama. A police
sergeant, Thomas Cook, attached to the Birmingham police intelligence
branch was plied with reports by Bureau informants. A Klan member
himself, Cook furnished this information to Robert Shelton's Alabama
Knights and arranged several meetings to discuss "matters
of interest." Cook supplied Klan leaders with the names of
"inter-racial organizations," the location of meetings,
and the membership lists of civil rights groups for circulation
in Klan publications. FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe wrote a confidential
memo to the Birmingham Special Agent in Charge (SAC) stating that
Cook had handed over inter-office intelligence memos on civil
rights activists during a Klan meeting. Rowe insisted that Cook
not only gave him relevant information that police had in their
files, but urged Rowe to "help himself to any material he
thought he would need for the Klan." 52

According to documents obtained by the
American Civil Liberties Union, the Birmingham SAC called Cook
and informed him of the progress that Freedom Rider buses had
made and when they were scheduled to arrive in the city. According
to Rowe, Cook and Birmingham's public safety director, arch-segregationist
Eugene "Bull" Connor conspired with Klan leaders and
directly organized physical attacks on Freedom Riders when the
buses reached their destination. According to one FBI memo, Connor
declared: "By God, if you are going to do this thing, do
it right." 53

In consultation with Shelton's group,
Birmingham police agreed not to show up for 15 or 20 minutes after
the buses pulled in, to give Klansmen sufficient time to carry
out their attack. Assailants were promised lenient treatment if
through some fluke, they managed to get arrested. During a planning
meeting that finalized logistical details, Grand Titan Hubert
Page advised Klansmen that Imperial Wizard Shelton had spoken
with Detective Cook, and was informed that Freedom Rider buses
were scheduled to arrive at 11:00 am.

Earlier that day, the KKK intercepted
another bus on its way to Birmingham, beating the passengers and
setting the vehicle ablaze. As agreed during consultations with
Klan leadership, when the buses arrived no police were present
at either of Birmingham's bus terminals, but 60 Klansmen - including
Rowe - were waiting. Klansmen attacked civil rights workers, reporters
and photographers, viciously beating anyone within reach with
chains, pipes and baseball bats.

According to ACLU attorney Howard Simon,
"We found that the FBI knew that the Birmingham Police Department
was infiltrated by the Klan, that many members of the police department
were Klan members, that they knew a person in intelligence was
passing information directly to leaders of the Klan, and they
also knew their undercover agent had worked out an agreement with
the police department to stay away from the terminals. They knew
all that and still continued their relationship with the police
department." 54

Though the Bureau claimed that its "Klan
- White Hate Groups" COINTELPRO was launched in order to
stifle white supremacist activities, the historical record proves
otherwise. The more well known, but by no means only examples
of Klan terror during the period - the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth
Street Baptist Church that killed four black children; the 1964
murders of civil rights workers Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner
in Mississippi: and the 1965 assassination of Viola Liuzzo and
her companion near Selma, Alabama, point to knowledge of the crimes,
and complicity in subsequent cover-ups by FBI officials.

Bureau informant Gary Thomas Rowe was
a central figure in some of the most publicized crimes of the
period, indulging in freelance acts of racist terror. He was suspected
of involvement in firebombing the home of a wealthy Black Birmingham
resident, the detonation of shrapnel bombs in Black neighborhoods
and the murder of a Black man during a 1963 demonstration. He
became a prime suspect in the Birmingham church bombing after
he failed two polygraph tests. His answers were described by investigators
as "deceptive" when he denied having been with the Klan
group that planted the bomb. 55

Despite enough evidence to open a preliminary
investigation, the FBI refused, covering-up for Rowe even when
another informant, John Wesley Hall, named him as a member of
a three-man Klan security committee holding veto power over all
proposed acts of violence. Years later, an independent inquiry
uncovered evidence that Hall became a Bureau informant two months
after the bombing and despite the fact that a polygraph test convinced
the Alabama FBI that he was probably involved in the attack himself,
Hall admitted to having moved dynamite for the plot's ringleader,
Robert E. Chambliss, a Klan member since 1924. Even though court
testimony and a wealth of evidence linked Hall, Rowe and other
members of the Alabama Knight's to the bombing, the suspects were
convicted on a misdemeanor charge - "possession of an explosive
without a permit." It took more than a decade and three bungled
investigations to finally convict Chambliss of the crime. 56

In July 1997, almost 35 years after the
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, the FBI re-opened its
investigation based on "new information." However, mainstream
news accounts failed to report the pivotal role played by Bureau
informants. The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a target of a 1963 Klan
assassination plot, believes he knows why only one man was convicted
for the bombing. "It is well known," the 75-year old
civil rights leader said, "there was collusion all along
between the FBI, local law enforcement and the Klan." Rev.
Shuttlesworth should know: Bureau informant John Wesley Hall was
the man who proposed killing the minister. 57

New light was shed on Rowe's privileged
position as an FBI provocateur tasked to "disrupt and neutralize"
the civil rights struggle. During a subsequent investigation into
the murder of Viola Liuzzo, evidence surfaced that it was Rowe
who actually fired the fatal shots that took her life. But instead
of prosecuting Rowe, the Bureau placed him in a federal witness
protection program. 58

In 1978, Rowe was indicted by an Alabama
grand jury as Liuzzo's killer. But complicity in shielding Rowe
and the Bureau from exposure came to light when the contents of
a J. Edgar Hoover memo to President Lyndon Johnson became public.
Hours after the killings Hoover wrote: "A Negro man was with
Mrs. Liuzzo and reportedly was sitting close to her." In
a subsequent memo to aides, Hoover said he informed the President
that "she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the
car, that it had the appearance of a necking party." 59 While
providing a glimpse into the pathological nature of Hoover's racism
and misogyny, the Director fails to enlighten us as to the mechanics
of a "necking party" during a 100 mph car chase in the
dead of night, a "party" by terrorized individuals fleeing
armed Klan thugs intent on killing them in cold blood. However
twisted, Hoover's slander was calculated to establish a motive;
one that would "justify" Mrs. Liuzzo's murder on grounds
of breaking one of nativism's primal laws: the prohibition against
sex between the races.

On November 3, 1979, a posse organized
by Klansmen and neo-Nazis murdered five members of the Communist
Workers Party (CWP) in broad daylight. The CWP had organized a
"Smash the Klan" demonstration in Greensboro, North
Carolina among the city's mostly black and working class mill
workers. CWP members included union organizers and activists who
had upset "the fundamental order of things." 60

An essential component for the operation,
organized by night-riding Klansmen, was U.S. Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) agent, Bernard Butkovich. The BATF
agent, a Vietnam veteran and demolitions expert undercover in
the local branch of the American Nazi Party, helped the Klan obtain
automatic weapons, and also in making their escape. 61

The posse had been organized and led by
an FBI infiltrator, Edward Dawson. Dawson was also a paid informant
for the Greensboro Police Department. 62 Dawson reported to his
handlers that eighty-five Klansmen meeting in nearby Lincolnton
had expressed their intent to counter-demonstrate on November
3. 63

The night-riders had stated they intended
to arm themselves for their counter-demonstration and that Klan
leader, Grand Dragon Virgil Griffin, was actively calling out
Klansmen from other states to participate. It was also rumored
that neo-Nazis from the Winston-Salem area had obtained a machine
gun and other weapons. Dawson reported to Greensboro detective
Jerry Cooper that Klansmen and neo-Nazis were assembling at the
home of a local Klan member and that they were armed. 64

The police/FBI informant had received
a copy of the parade route the day before the CWP-initiated march;
a map had been supplied by Detective Cooper. Dawson had driven
over the parade route three hours earlier with a contingent of
out-of-town Klansmen. Dawson also alerted Cooper that the Klansmen
and neo- Nazis possessed three handguns and nine long-barrelled
rifles, including automatic weapons supplied by BATF agent Bernard
Butkovich. 65

Prior to the beginning of the CWP's march
and demonstration, Cooper and other police officials drove by
the house where the Klansmen and neo-Nazis were assembling. They
jotted down license plate numbers and then declared a lunch break
-- at approximately 10 a.m. 66 Less than an hour later, Cooper,
trailing behind the Klan caravan reported, "shots fired"
and then "heavy gunfire." The tactical squad assigned
to monitor the march were still out to lunch. 67

Two other officers, responding to a domestic
disturbance call, noted the absence of patrol cars usually assigned
to the area. They arrived at the Morningside projects, the site
of the CWP march. Officer Wise later reported having received
a most unusual call from the police communications center. The
officers were asked how long they anticipated being at their call;
they were subsequently advised to "clear the area as soon
as possible." 68

Moments later, five demonstrators lay
dead, murdered in broad daylight by members of the Ku Klux Klan
and the American Nazi Party. 69 According to Michael Novick, the
Greensboro massacre "set the tone for neo-Nazi organizing
by the KKK and other white supremacists in the ensuing decade."
70

A subsequent civil suit brought against
the neo-Nazis, the Klan and the Greensboro police resulted in
a partial award to the surviving family members. FBI and BATF
agents walked away scott-free.

The Secret Army Organization

Convinced that the United States was under
threat of an imminent communist takeover, Robert DePugh, a disenchanted
member of the John Birch Society, founded the Minutemen in the
early sixties. Forged as a "last line of defense against
communism," DePugh's secret warriors were dedicated to building
an underground army to fight against "the enemy within."
71

However absurd this paranoia may appear
on the surface, it had serious and deadly consequences for anyone
caught in the cross-hairs. Before their undoing in 1969, the result
not of a sinister plot by "communist infiltrators in the
government," but because DePugh and others were prepared
to rob banks to finance the organization, the Minutemen had built
a formidable national network, with thousands of members stockpiling
secret arsenals with more than enough firepower to match their
feverish rhetoric. In 1966, 19 New York Minutemen were arrested
and accused of plotting to bomb three summer camps allegedly used
by "Communist, left wing and liberal" groups "for
indoctrination purposes." Subsequent raids uncovered a huge
arms cache that included military assault rifles, bombs, mortars,
machine guns, grenade launchers and a bazooka.

In February 1970, six Minutemen from four
states led by Jerry Lynn Davis held a clandestine summit in northern
Arizona. Surveying the ruins, they were convinced that "communist
elements" in the Justice Department had destroyed the group.
Undeterred by recent events, they formed the nucleus of the Secret
Army Organization (SAO).

As conceived by Davis and the others,
the SAO would be armed but low-key: a propaganda group with a
potential for waging guerrilla war against leftists, should the
need arise. Emphasizing regional autonomy and a decentralized
structure, they believed they had inoculated themselves against
unwanted attention from "communist-controlled" government
agencies. Shortly after the meeting, chapters were established
in San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Seattle with promising contacts
made in Portland, El Paso, Los Angeles and Oklahoma. 72

A review of events in San Diego, submitted
to the Church Committee in June 1975 and based on "pubic
admissions of the officers and agents involved, including sworn
testimony at various criminal trials and statements given to news
reporters and investigators," 73 describes how the FBI played
a central role in the creation of the Secret Army Organization,
placing informant Howard Berry Godfrey in a leadership position.

Godfrey, a San Diego fireman, devout Mormon,
and self-styled commando, was an FBI informant for more than five
years. According to ex-members, it was Godfrey who was the real
force behind the SAO. While employed by the FBI, Godfrey selected
the organization's name and defrayed its start-up costs, including
expenditures for printing and mailing literature. By September
1971, there were four active cells in San Diego. Little did they
know they were under the direction of the FBI, the State's ultimate
"secret army organization."

San Diego was the center of a thriving
activist community committed to a multitude of projects anathema
to the nativist right. With 200,000 active-duty soldiers stationed
at nearby bases, the Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM)
was the outgrowth of antiwar efforts to influence soldiers bound
for Vietnam. MDM organizing had made small, but promising chinks
in the military's armor. Campus organizing by the Students for
a Democratic Society (SDS), and the emergence of militant Chicano
organizations in the area were viewed as serious threats to the
successful prosecution of the war. A thriving underground press,
in the form of the San Diego Street Journal, was in stark contrast
to the conservative and establishment-oriented media. But when
the Journal ran a series of exposes on the shady financial empire
of Nixon crony, C. Arnholt Smith, the response from the right
was swift. It would soon turn violent. 74

Between November 1969 and January 1970,
remnants of the Minutemen launched attacks against the Journal.
Bullets were fired into the office, paint splashed over furniture,
equipment smashed, records and subscription lists stolen, staff
cars firebombed, Journal vending machines vandalized. When the
newspaper attempted to relocate to new offices, their prospective
landlord was arrested by the San Diego police on a fabricated
murder charge. Released after an hour, he told the Journal they'd
have to look elsewhere. As the SAO gradually came online as a
Bureau surrogate, attacks against the newspaper and its staff
intensified. 75

Another SAO target was Dr. Peter Bohmer,
a radical economics professor at San Diego State University who
was popular with students and an articulate spokesperson against
the war. Harassed by conservative university bureaucrats who objected
to his antiwar activism, Bohmer was fired after a protracted struggle.
Predictably, his much-publicized battle with the university drew
SAO scrutiny. Beginning in 1971, a vicious campaign was launched
against the professor. In April, tear gas crystals were dumped
in a car parked in front of his home. On May 4, a muffled voice
warned over the phone "the cross hairs are on you."

In the summer of 1971, San Diego was chosen
as the site for the 1972 Republican convention. Harassment against
Bohmer increased, punctuated by assaults targeting the antiwar
and Chicano movements. 76 Among these acts were destruction of
newspaper offices and book stores, firebombing of cars, and the
distribution of leaflets giving the address of the collective
where anti-war activist Peter Bohmer lived "for any of our
readers who may care to look up this Red Scum, and say hello."

On January 6, 1972 the SAO dramatically
upped the ante. Earlier that day SAO cross-hair stickers were
plastered on the door of Bohmer's office; that evening a caller
threatened, "This time we left a sticker, next time we may
leave a grenade. This is the SAO!"

A few hours later, in a car parked outside
Bohmer's home, SAO soldier George Mitchell Hoover fiddled with
a gun. Sitting next to him was Godfrey, the FBI's informant. Aiming
a 9mm Polish Radom pistol, Hoover fired two shots into the house;
he would have fired a third but the weapon jammed. The first bullet
struck San Diego Street Journal reporter Paula Tharp, shattering
her elbow. The second shot narrowly missed Shari Whitehead and
lodged in a window frame above her head. Two shell-casings matching
the slug removed from Tharp's arm were retrieved from the street.

The next day Godfrey turned over the gun
to his FBI control agent, Steve Christiansen, a devout Mormon
and dedicated anti-communist himself. The Special Agent hid the
weapon under his couch for more than six months while the San
Diego police conducted a half-hearted investigation. Though guilty
of covering-up a criminal act, Christiansen insisted that Bureau
superiors knew he was hiding the gun and fully approved of his
actions to protect "confidential sources." 77

Although the Tharp shooting generated
considerable publicity, and even some pressure to make arrests,
the San Diego police responded with the absurd story that Bohmer
carried out the attack himself in an effort "to attract sympathy
for his cause." 78

Relentless harassment continued throughout
the spring of 1972; more firebombings, threatening phone calls,
more cross-hair stickers, just another day at the office for right-wing
counterguerrillas. But then the group made a fatal mistake, one
that would cost them dearly.

On June 19, 1972, William Yakopec entered
the Guild Theater, a local porno house; concealed under his jacket
was a bomb. After he pried a cover loose from a vent at the rear
of the building, he hurriedly left the premises. Moments later
a powerful explosion ripped through the theater, destroying the
screen, blowing debris 60 feet into the air and showering the
terrified audience with concrete shards and two-by-fours. Unfortunately
for Yakopec and the SAO, a deputy district attorney and a San
Diego cop were in the audience, conducting an "investigation"
to determine whether I am Curious (Yellow) met pertinent criteria
to be banned as pornography. 79

Though city fathers had no problem when
right-wing militias directed their wrath at suitable targets,
taking out a cop and a district attorney was too much even in
San Diego. Rubien D. Brandon, the officer who narrowly escaped
being blown to kingdom come, angrily phoned the FBI and demanded
the name of their informer. A week later, seven members of the
SAO were behind bars. Yakopec was charged with the Guild Theater
bombing, George Hoover with the Tharp shooting and the group's
nominal leader, Jerry Lynn Davis, with receiving stolen property
and possession of illegal explosives. Reluctantly, the Bureau
realized the time had come to shut the project down.

During the investigation of the Guild
Theater bombing, the Yakopec home and those of other SAO members
were raided by police. Investigators recovered two half pound
blocks of C-4 plastique, HDP primers, blasting caps, 30-40 feet
of fuses, SAO literature, stacks of cross-hair stickers ready
to go and a small arsenal of weapons, including an unopened case
of M-16's valued at more than $60,000. During a simultaneous raid
on the home of Genevieve and Richard Fleury, police seized ammunition,
dozens of revolvers, lugers and eight bandoliers containing more
than a thousand rounds of 30-caliber bullets. It was later revealed
that some of these munitions had been transferred to the SAO from
the Marine base at Camp Pendelton by a right-wing physician, Dr.
Harold Young. Ex-Minuteman Dino Martinelli claimed he had been
involved in the transfer and that the SDPD and FBI were aware
of the thefts but did nothing. 80

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
attorney Frederick Hetter discovered during a subsequent investigation
"that [FBI infiltrator] Godfrey supplied 75% of the money
for the SAO" in order for the terrorist army to acquire the
weapons. 81

What were the results of exposing the
extensive links between federal authorities and the Secret Army
Organization? While Yakopec, Hoover and Davis went to prison,
Godfrey, the FBI's point-man, was rewarded with a job in the state
fire marshal's office. Agent Christiansen left the Bureau shortly
after his role in the affair came to light. Refusing to talk,
Christiansen would only tell reporters that "The FBI is taking
good care of us." 82 The FBI then continued with other illegal
intelligence and terror programs directed against Bohmer and associates,
including several assassination plots. Not one FBI agent or informer
has been prosecuted.

Snitch Jacketing

Under the guidance of the FBI, informants
were often able to work their way into positions of power, such
as was the case with Chicago-BPP Chief of Security William O'Neal,
or American Indian Movement bodyguard Douglas Durham. Such individuals
were often considered valuable due to the (FBI-supplied) information
they were able to provide. Besides misleading and provoking the
infiltrated groups, another technique used by informants was to
"snitch jacket" genuine activists, to make them appear
to be the informants. One such person was Kwame Toure, formerly
Stokely Carmichael.

Utilizing the services of an infiltrator
who had worked his way into a position as the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee leader's bodyguard, the Bureau deliberately
created the false appearance that Stokely Carmichael was himself
an operative. 83 In a memo dated July 10, 1968, the SAC, New York,
proposed to Hoover that:

... consideration be given to convey the
impression that CARMICHAEL is a CIA informer. One method of accomplishing
[this] would be to have a carbon copy of an informant report supposedly
written by CARMICHAEL to the CIA carefully deposited in the automobile
of a close Black Nationalist friend ... It is hoped that when
the informant report is read it will help promote distrust between
CARMICHAEL and the Black Community ... It is also suggested that
we inform a certain percentage of reliable criminal and racial
informants that "we have it from reliable sources that CARMICHAEL
is a CIA agent. It is hoped that the informants would spread the
rumor in various large Negro communities across the land. 84

Pursuant to a May 19,1969 Airtel from
the SAC, San Francisco, to Hoover, the Bureau then proceeded to
"assist" the BPP in "expelling" Carmichael
through the forgery of letters on party letterhead. The gambit
worked, as is evidenced in the September 5, 1970 assertion by
BPP head Huey P. Newton: "We ... charge that Stokely Carmichael
is operating as an agent of the CIA." 85

Snitch jacketing has even resulted in
the target's death. This appears to have occurred in 1975 in the
case of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a young Micmac woman working with
the American Indian Movement on the Pine Ridge Reservation. According
to attorney Bruce Ellison,

"I represented a young mother and
AIM member named Anna Mae Pictou on weapons charges. She told
me after her arrest that the FBI threatened to see her dead within
a year unless she cooperated against members of AIM. In an operation
[similar to those] previously used against members of the Black
Panther Party, the FBI, through an informant named Doug Durham
who had infiltrated AIM leadership, began a rumor that she was
an informant.

"Six months later her body was found
on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The FBI said she died of exposure.
They cut off her hands, claiming that this was necessary to identify
her, and buried her under the name of Jane Doe.

"We were able to get her body exhumed,
and a second, independent autopsy revealed that rather than dying
of exposure, that someone had placed a pistol to the back of her
head and pulled the trigger. When I asked for her hands after
the second autopsy, because she was originally not buried with
her hands, an FBI agent went to his car and came back and handed
me a box, and with a big smile on his face he said, 'You want
her hands? Here.'" 86

The FBI agents involved then used the
morgue photos of Aquash to frighten another victim, Myrtle Poor
Bear, a woman with a history of deep psychological disorder, for
which she had undergone extensive treatment, explaining to their
captive that she'd end up "the same way" unless she
did exactly what they wanted. Poor Bear quoted Agent Wood as informing
her, in specific reference to Aquash, that "they [Price and
Wood] could get away with killing because they were agents."
Poor Bear was coerced into giving false testimony which led to
the extradition of Leonard Peltier, who remains a political prisoner
to this day. [See "Political Prisoners" section].

The Subversion of the Press

In 1960, the FBI implemented a formal
COINTELPRO with the expressed intent of destroying pro-independence
groups in Puerto Rico. In doing so, the Bureau engaged in the
same kind of political warfare that was used by the United States
in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America. In an August 4, 1960
memorandum to the Special Agent in Charge, San Juan, Director
Hoover wrote:

"In considering this matter, you
should bear in mind the Bureau desires to disrupt the activities
of these organizations and is not interested in mere harrassment."
87

San Juan complied, at least on the level
of planting disinformation in the island press. Agents systematically
planted articles and editorials, often containing malicious gossip
concerning independentista leaders' alleged sexual or financial
affairs, in "friendly" newspapers, and dispensed "private"
warnings to the owners of island radio stations that their FCC
licenses might be revoked if pro independence material were aired.

There is clear evidence that agents "talked
to" the owners of radio stations WLEO in Ponce, WKFE in Yauco
and WJRS in San German about their licensing as early as 1963.
One result was cancellation of the one hour daily time-block allotted
to "Radio Bandera," a program produced by the APU. Such
tactics to deny a media voice to independentistas accord well
with other, more directly physical methods employed during the
1970s, after COINTELPRO supposedly ended:

[There was] the bombing of Claridad [daily
paper first of the MPIPR and then the PSP] printing presses which
has occurred at least five times in the present decade. Although
the MPI [now PSP] usually furnished the police with detailed information
as to the perpetrators of these acts, not even one trial has ever
been held on this island in connection with these bombings, nor
even one arrest made. The same holds true for a 1973 bombing of
the National Committee of the [PIP]. 88

In the same memo, Hoover recommended gearing
up the COINTELPRO, using existing infiltrators within "groups
seeking independence for Puerto Rico" as agents provocateurs.
The director felt that "carefully selected informants"
might be able to raise "controversial issues" within
independentista formations. Further, he pointed out that such
individuals might be utilized effectively to create situations
in which "nationalist elements could be pitted against the
communist elements to disrupt some of the organizations, particularly
the MPIPR and ... FUPI."

Hoover also instructed that "the
San Juan Office should be constantly alert for articles extolling
the virtues of Puerto Rico's relationship to the United States
as opposed to complete separation from the United States, for
use in anonymous mailings to selected subjects in the independence
movement who may be psychologically affected by such information."

The Bureau engaged in intensive investigation
of independentista leaders both on the island and in New York
in order to ascertain their "weaknesses" in terms of
"morals, criminal records, spouses, children, family life,
educational qualifications and personal activities other than
independence activities." The findings, however flimsy or
contrived, were pumped into the media, disseminated as bogus cartoons
or "political broadsides," and/or surfaced within organizational
contexts by provocateurs, all with the express intent of setting
the leaders one against the other and at odds with their respective
organizational memberships.

When evidence to support such redbaiting
contentions could not be discovered, the FBI's COINTELPRO specialists
simply made it up:

MPIPR leaders, cognizant of the basic
antipathy of Puerto Ricans, predominantly Roman Catholic, to communism,
have consistently avoided, at times through public statements,
any direct, overt linkage of the MPIPR to communism ... The [San
Juan office] feels that the above situation can be exploited by
means of a counterintelligence letter, purportedly by an anonymous
veteran MPIPR member. This letter would alert MPIPR members to
a probable Communist takeover of the organization. 89

Not only did the Bureau's systematic denial
of media access to, spreading of disinformation about, and fostering
of factionalism within the independentista movement have the effect
of negating much of the movement's electoral potential within
the island arena itself, such tactics also subverted other initiatives
to resolve the issue of Puerto Rico's colonial status in a peaceful
fashion. This concerns in particular a plebescite called for July
23, 1967. During the ten months prior to the scheduled referendum
to determine the desires of the Puertorriqueno public with regard
to the political status of their island, the Bureau went far out
of its way to spread confusion. The COINTELPRO methods used included
creation of two fictitious organizations Grupo pro-Uso Voto del
MPI (roughly, "Group within the MPIPR in Favor of Voting
to Achieve Independence") and the "Committee Against
Foreign Domination of the Fight for Independence" - as the
medium through which to misrepresent independentista positions
"from the inside ." One outcome was that Puertorriqueno
voters increasingly shied away from the apparently jumbled and
bewildering independentista agenda and "accepted" continuation
of a "commonwealth" status under U.S. domination.

A 1967 Airtel from SAC, San Juan to J.
Edgar Hoover describes a portion of the COINTELPRO methods to
be used in subverting the 1967 United Nations plebescite to determine
the political status of Puerto Rico:

[deleted] of the MPIPR Youth, has a personal
following, and the San Juan Office feels that if [deleted] can
be split from the MPIPR at this time, enough of the MPIPR Youth
members would be sufficiently confused and disgruntled to effectively
neutralize the MPIPR during the critical period just prior to
the plebescite scheduled for July 23, 1967. 90

With this accomplished, the Bureau set
about seeing to it the independentistas remained artificially
discredited (and the overall PuertorriqueÒo option to mount
a coherent effort to protest or reconvene the plebescite truncated)
by shifting responsibility for the disaster onto its foremost
victims:

It might be desirable to blame the communist
bloc and particularly Cuba for the failure of the United Nations
and to criticize Mari Bras and others for isolating the Puerto
Rican independence forces from the democratic countries. 91

The other COINTELPRO's also made use the
news media. One tragic story concerns Jean Seberg, a well known
actress and white supporter of the Black Panther Party. According
to former FBI agent M. Wesley Swearingen, who worked in Los Angeles
at the time, a culture of racism had so permeated the Bureau and
its field offices that the agents seethed with hatred toward the
Panthers and the white women who associated with them.

"In the view of the Bureau,"
Swearingen reported, "Jean was giving aid and comfort to
the enemy, the BPP ... The giving of her white body to a black
man was an unbearable thought for many of the white agents. An
agent [allegedly Richard W. Held] was overheard to say, a few
days after I arrived in Los Angeles from New York, 'I wonder how
she'd like to gobble my dick while I shove my .38 up that black
bastard's ass [a reference to BPP theorist Raymond "Masai"
Hewitt, with whom Seberg was reputedly having an affair]."
92

On May 27, 1970, when Seberg was in her
fifth month of pregnancy, Held sent a telegram to headquarters
requesting approval to plant a story with Hollywood gossip columnists
to the effect that Seberg was pregnant, not by her husband, Romaine
Gary, but by a Panther. Held's idea was approved, although implementation
was to be postponed "approximately two additional months,"
to protect the secrecy of a wiretap the Bureau had installed in
the LA and San Francisco BPP headquarters, and until the victim's
"pregnancy would be more visible to everyone." Hoover
felt that Seberg should be "neutralized" because she'd
been a financial supporter of the Black Panther Party.

The schedule was apparently accelerated,
because on June 6, Held sent Hoover a letter and attached newspaper
clipping demonstrating the "success" of his COINTELPRO
action: a column by Joyce Haber, which had run in the Los Angeles
Times on May 19. Known by the FBI to have been emotionally unstable
and in the care of a psychiatrist before the operation began,
Seberg responded to the "disclosure" by attempting suicide
with an overdose of sleeping pills. This in turn precipitated
the premature delivery of her fetus; it died two days later. Seberg
held a press conference, and brought the fetus in a glass jar,
to prove that it was white.

Henceforth, a shattered Jean Seberg was
to regularly attempt suicide on or near the anniversary of her
child's death. In 1979, she was successful. Romaine Gary, her
ex-husband, who all along maintained he was the father of the
child, followed suit shortly thereafter. There is no indication
that this was ever considered to be anything other than an extremely
successful COINTELPRO operation.

The FBI actively promoted the idea that
the Panthers and other black nationalists were anti-Semitic, in
order to weaken their support "among liberal and naive elements."
In one indicent, the New York Office sent anonymous letters to
Rabbi Meir Kahane of the right-wing Jewish Defense League to try
to provoke a response against the BPP. In reference to a July
25, 1969 FBI report entitled, "JEWISH DEFENSE LEAGUE, RACIAL
MATTERS" the New York Field Office proposed:

Referenced report has been reviewed by
the NYO in an effort to target one individual within the Jewish
Defense League (JEDEL) who would be the suitable recipient of
information furnished on an anonymous basis that the Bureau wishes
to disseminate and/or use for future counterintelligence purposes.

NY is of the opinion that the individual
within JEDEL who would most suitably serve the above stated purposed
would be Rabbi MEIR KAHANE, a Director of JEDEL. It is noted that
Rabbi KAHANE's background as a writer for the NY newspaper "Jewish
Press" would enable him to give widespread coverage of anti-Semetic
[sic] statements made by the BPP and other Black Nationalist hate
groups not only to members of JEDEL but to other individuals who
would take cognizance of such statements. ...

In view of the above comments the following
is submitted as the suggested communication to be used to establish
rapport between the anonymous source and the selected individual
associated with JEDEL:

Dear Rabbi Kahane:

I am a negro man who is 48 years old and
served his country in the U.S. Army in WW2 and worked as a truck
driver with "the famous red-ball express" in Gen. Eisenhour's
Army in France and Natzi Germany. One day I had a crash with the
truck I was driving, a 2 1/2 ton truck, and was injured real bad.
I was treated and helped by a Jewish Army Dr. named "Rothstein"
who helped me get better again.

Also I was encouraged to remain in high
school for two years by my favorite teacher, Mr. Katz. I have
always thought Jewish people are good and they have helped me
all my life. That is why I became so upset about my oldest son
who is a Black Panther and very much against Jewish people. My
oldest son just returned from Algiers in Africa where he met a
bunch of other Black Panthers from all over the world. He said
to me that they all agree that the Jewish people are against all
the colored people and that the only friends the colored people
have are the Arabs.

I told my child that the Jewish people
are the friends of the colored people but he calls me a Tom and
says I'll never be anything better than a Jew boy's slave.

Last night my boy had a meeting at my
house with six of his Black Panther friends. From the way they
talked it sounded like they had a plan to force Jewish store owners
to give them money or they would drop a bomb on the Jewish store.
Some of the money they will get will be sent to the Arabs in Africa.

They left books and pictures around with
Arab writing on them and pictures of Jewish soldiers killing Arab
babys. I think they are going to give these away at Negro Christian
Churchs.

I thought you might be able to stop this.
I think I can get some of the pictures and books without getting
myself in trouble. I will send them to you if you are interested.

I would like not to use my real name at
this time.

A friend"

It is further suggested that a second
communication be sent to Rabbi KAHANE approximately one week after
the above described letter which will follow the same foremat
[sic], but will contain as enclosures some BPP artifacts such
as pictures of BOBBY SEALE, ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, a copy of a BPP
newspaper, etc. It is felt that a progression of letters should
then follow which would further establish rapport with the JEDEL
and eventually culminate in the anonymous letter writer requesting
some response from the JEDEL recipient of these letters. 93

Political Prisoners

When the government can select a person
for criminal persecution because of their political activity,
when they can fabricate evidence against that person and suppress
evidence proving that fabrication, and prosecute a person and
put them in prison for any amount of time, let alone for life,
then you have a political prisoner.

There are numerous people in American
jails who've dedicated their lives to the transformation of their
country, who put the benefit of their communities ahead of themselves,
who believed that transformation was not only possible but they
were willing to die for it. They were willing to die to end brutality,
racism, economic discrimination, imperialism, war.

In the case of AIM, this has meant the
wholesale jailing of the movement's leadership. Virtually every
known AIM leader in the United States has been incarcerated in
either state or federal prisons since (or even before) the organization's
formal emergence in 1968, some repeatedly. After the 1973 siege
of Wounded Knee the FBI caused 542 separate charges to be filed
against those it identified as "key AIM leaders." This
resulted in 15 convictions, all on such petty or contrived offenses
as "interfering with a federal officer in the performance
of his duty." Russell Means was faced with 37 felony and
three misdemeanor charges, none of which held up in court. Organization
members often languished in jail for months as the cumulative
bail required to free them outstripped resource capabilities of
AIM and supporting groups.

Another example was the "Panther
21" case, which in 1969 was the longest criminal trial in
New York history. It took the jury just ninety minutes to reach
"not guilty" verdicts in all of the 156 of the charges
against the thirteen defendants who ultimately stood trial.

A fair accounting of American political
prisoners is beyond the scope of this report, which seeks only
to draw attention to the problem of political repression and the
tactics used, making note of a few illustrative cases.

Leonard Peltier

U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Gerald Heaney,
after reviewing numerous court transcripts and FBI documents,
concluded that the United States Government overreacted at Wounded
Knee. Instead of carefully considering the legitimate grievances
of Native Americans, the response was essentially a military one
which culminated in a deadly firefight on June 26, 1975, between
Native Americans and FBI agents and U.S. Marshals.

While Judge Heaney believed that the "Native
Americans" had some culpability in the firefight that day,
he concluded the United States must share the responsibility.
It never has. The FBI has never been held accountable or even
publicly investigated for what one Federal petit jury and Judge
Heaney concluded was complicity in the creation of a climate of
fear and terror on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

The resulting firefight near Oglala was
preceded by FBI documents internally declaring AIM to be one of
the most dangerous organizations in the country and a threat to
national security. It followed by two months the issuing of a
position paper entitled "FBI Paramilitary Operations in Indian
Country," a how-to plan for dealing with AIM in the battlefield.
It used such terms as "neutralization," which in the
document was defined as "shooting to kill." It included
the role of the then-Nixon White House in handling complaints
as to such military tactics being utilized domestically.

It followed by one month the build-up
of FBI personnel on the Pine Ridge Reservation with mostly SWAT
team members from various divisions of the FBI. It followed by
three weeks an inspection tour of the reservation by senior FBI
officials and the reporting of concern by those officials for
the widespread support enjoyed by AIM in the outlying communities
on the Pine Ridge Reservation, such as Oglala.

The FBI headquarters document further
referred to an area near Oglala which reportedly contained bunkers
and would require the use of paramilitary forces to assault. Three
weeks later a firefight broke out on the ranch of elders Cecelia
and Harry Jumping Bull which lasted for nearly nine hours. FBI
documents describe as many as 47 people being involved in the
battle with SWAT teams of the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs,
and State police agencies.

Three young men lost their lives that
day, each shot in the head, two FBI agents and one AIM member.
Members of the American Indian Movement, before they escaped,
sat and prayed for the three men who died that day. The FBI has
always only considered that only two men died that day, their
own agents.

One of the agents had in his briefcase
a map of the reservation. It had the Jumping Bull ranch circled
with the word "bunkers" written next to it. The bunkers
turned out to be aged and crumbling root cellars.

Leonard Peltier and other AIM members
from outside the reservation had come into the Jumping Bull area
to join other local AIM members because the climate of violence
on the reservation had gotten so intense that people felt the
need to gain assistance from the outside, so men and women came
in, including Leonard Peltier, and they brought with them their
single-shot 22's and their rusted shotguns and a few hunting rifles
that they were able to get, and they were in a camp on the Jumping
Bull ranch.

The government used the incident to increase
its campaign of disruption and destruction of the American Indian
Movement. FBI agents, dressed and equipped like combat soldiers,
searched homes and questioned Pine Ridge residents at gunpoint.
Armored vehicles patrolled the reservation, as did SWAT teams
and National Guard helicopters.

This was accompanied by a public disinformation
campaign by the FBI, designed to make Oglala residents and their
guests appear to be the aggressors and, in fact, terrorists. The
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights would soon report, "It is
patently clear that many of the statements released to the media
regarding the incident are either false, unsubstantiated, or directly
misleading."

Noting Leonard Peltier's regular presence
and involvement in AIM activities throughout the country, the
FBI targeted him for prosecution from the desks of its agents.
According to FBI documents, about two and a half weeks after the
firefight, the Bureau was going to, in its own words, "develop
information to lock Peltier into the case," and it set out
to do so.

The FBI eventually charged four AIM members,
including Peltier, with the killing of the agents. No one has
ever been prosecuted for the killing of AIM member Joe Stuntz
that day.

After hearing testimony of numerous eyewitnesses
to the violence directed at AIM members by the goon squad and
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, two of Leonard Peltier's
codefendants were acquitted on self-defense grounds by an all-white
jury in the conservative town of Cedar Rapids, Iowa -- truly a
remarkable thing, but people who were willing to keep their eyes
and their ears open and listen to the truth, and were able, by
a judge who had the courage and willingness to learn himself,
to allow this evidence to be presented.

However, after those acquittals, the FBI
analyzed why these two men, these two long-haired indian militant
men could be acquitted by an all-white jury, and decided a new
judge was needed. FBI documents show that in a meeting in Washington,
D.C. at FBI headquarters, there was a decision made to "put
the full prosecutive weight of the Federal Government" against
Leonard Peltier.

Evidence shows the government used now
admittedly false eyewitness affidavits to extradite Peltier from
Canada. This would catch the attention of Amnesty International
and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, but only a little bit.

The Court of Appeals would call such conduct
"a clear abuse of the investigative process by the FBI"
and give credence to the claims of indian people that if the government
is willing to fabricate evidence to extradite a person in this
country, it is willing to fabricate evidence to convict those
branded as the enemy. Well, absolutely true, but Leonard Peltier
remains in prison.

At Peltier's trial the government presented
evidence and argued to the jury that he personally shot and killed
the agents. To do this, the government presented ballistics evidence
purportedly connecting a shell casing found near the agents' bodies
with a rifle said to be possessed by Peltier on that day, and
the coerced and fabricated eyewitness account of a terrified teenager,
claiming that the agents followed Peltier in a van, precipitating
the firefight in Oglala.

Documents obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act show that the ballistics evidence was a fraud;
that the rifle could not have fired the expended casing found
near the body. Further, the FBI had suppressed evidence showing
the agents followed a pickup, not a van, into the compound, and
thought someone else, not Peltier, was in that vehicle.

Citing the case of Leonard Peltier as
an example, Amnesty International has called for an independent
inquiry into the use of our criminal justice system for political
purposes by the FBI and other intelligence agencies in this country.
Amnesty cited similar concerns for other members of AIM and other
victims of the COINTELPRO-type operations by the FBI.

Upon disclosure of these documents, a
renewed effort in a new trial was sought from the courts. While
concluding that the suppressed evidence "casts a strong doubt"
on the government's case, the appellate courts denied relief.
The U.S. Attorney's office has now admitted in court that it had
no credible evidence Leonard Peltier killed the agents, and speciously
claimed it never tried to prove it did. Under our system, if there
is a reasonable doubt, then Leonard Peltier is not guilty, yet
he has been in prison for nearly 25 years for a crime he did not
commit.

The FBI still withholds thousands of pages
of documents in this case, claiming in many instances that disclosure
would compromise the national security. In the absence of such
disclosure, no further efforts in a new trial are possible. And
Leonard Peltier is not alone in his imprisonment for his political
activities.

Mumia Abu Jamal

In the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, neutralization
occurred by falsely creating the appearance that he was in commission
of a crime he did not commit, to put him in prison. The cost of
political activism can include judicial railroading into the electric
chair, or the gas chamber or lethal injection.

It is unquestionable that from a very
early age, Mumia Abu-Jamal was specifically targeted for neutralization
by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Philadelphia Police,
and that the pattern of police activity evident in that targeting,
was continued, as it was in a number of comparable cases, so long
as he maintained political activism, and this creates the basis
to believe that he was in fact framed for the crime.

Mumia was deprived a fair trial, in which
key witnesses were not allowed to testify, exculpatory evidence
was excluded, and a key witness had been arrested numerous times
for prostitution, opening the possibility that her testimony was
paid or coerced. Although no motive was ever shown for why Mumia
would have killed a police officer, there was a certainly a motive
to neutralize and frame him.

Geronimo ji Jaga Pratt

Elmer Gerard ("Geronimo" or
"G" ji Jaga) Pratt was an active member of the Los Angeles
Black Panther Party (LA-BPP) Chapter during the counterintelligence
campaign which resulted in the "shooting war" described
earlier, between the US organization and the Panthers.

When Bunchy Carter and Ed Huggins were
assassinated by US gunmen on January 17, 1969, it was discovered
that Carter had prepared an audio tape for such an eventuality,
designating Pratt his successor as head of the LA-BPP. Pratt was
also named by Carter to succeed himself and Huggins as chapter
representative on the national Panther Central Committee. 94 It
was at precisely this point that he appears to have been personally
targeted for "neutralization" through the application
of COINTELPRO techniques.

Pratt was designated a "Key Black
Extremist" by the L.A. Bureau office and placed in the National
Security Index. 95 As a consequence, he was targeted not only
for neutralization by the FBI, but, as former Panther infiltrator
Louis Tackwood had pointed out, this automatically placed him
"on the wall' of the Los Angeles Police Department's (LAPD)
Criminal Conspiracy Section (CCS) "glass-house" (headquarters)
as an individual to be eliminated by local police action. As the
informant explained the CCS operation:

The room is broken up into divisions,
see my point? Black, white, chicano and subversives. Everybody's
there. And every last one of the walls has pictures of them. This
one black, the middle all white, and the chicanos all on this
side. Most of the files are on the walls, you see? ... They got
everybody. Panthers, SDS, Weathermen. Let me explain to you. They
got a national hookup. You see my point? And because of this national
power, they are the only organization in the police department
that has a liaison man, that works for the FBI, and the FBI has
a liaison man who works with the CCS." 96

The inevitable consequence of this was
that the new LA-BPP was placed under intensely close surveillance
by the FBI 97 and subjected to a series of unfounded but serious
arrests by the Bureau's local police affiliates at CCS.

A conspiracy investigation of Pratt was
opened with regard to the robbery of a Bank of America facility
already known by the Bureau to have been carried out by US members.
98 Pratt was also made the subject of a personalized series of
COINTELPRO cartoons designed to make him a target for the attentions
of US.

This was followed very closely by a Bureau
effort to ensnarl both Pratt and Roger Lewis in a violation of
the 1940 Smith Act and plotting of "insurrection." 99

Four days after a similar raid on a Panther
apartment in Chicago (the raid which left Mark Clark and Fred
Hampton dead), forty men of the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT)
squad, with more than a hundred regular police as backup, raided
the Los Angeles Panther headquarters at 5:30 in the morning ...
(No suggestion has been made that the two raids were linked. But
it's interesting to note that Fred Hampton had been in Los Angeles
one or two days before his death, meeting with Geronimo Pratt,
whom Tackwood says was the main target of the second raid.) The
Panthers chose to defend themselves, and for four hours they fought
off police, refusing to surrender until press and public were
on the scene. Six of them were wounded. Thirteen were arrested.
Miraculously, none of them were killed. 100

The similarities between the Chicago and
Los Angeles raids are undeniable, with a special local police
unit closely linked to the FBI involved in both assaults, spurious
warrants seeking "illegal weapons" utilized on both
occasions, predawn timing of both raids to catch the Panthers
asleep and a reliance upon overwhelming police firepower to the
exclusion of all other methods. Both raids occurred in the context
of an ongoing and highly energetic anti-BPP COINTELPRO, and -
as in the Hampton assassination - bullets were fired directly
into Pratt's bed. Unlike the Chicago leader, however, Pratt was
sleeping on the floor, the result of spinal injuries sustained
in Vietnam. 101

Pratt was explicitly singled out for neutralization
by the head of the Bureau's LA-COINTELPRO section, Richard Wallace
Held - the son of Richard G. Held, who orchestrated the coverup
of FBI involvement in the Hampton-Clark assassinations. 102

In both instances, the FBI had managed
to place an infiltrator/provocateur very high within the local
BPP chapter - O'Neal in Chicago, in Los Angeles it was Melvin
"Cotton" Smith, number three man in the LA-BPP, who
provided detailed floorplans, including sleeping arrangements
of the Panther facility, prior to the raid. 103 And, in both cases,
surviving Panthers were immediately arrested for their "assault
upon the police." 104

When the resultant case against the L.A.
Panthers was finally prosecuted in July, 1971:

... there was a "surprise" development.
Melvin "Cotton" Smith turned up as a star witness for
the prosecution. According to Deputy District Attorney Ronald
H. Carroll, Smith had turned State's evidence to escape prosecution
... [However] on November 22, 1971, Tackwood testified ... he
had started working for [CCS Sergeant R.G.] Farwell in the fall
of 1969, before the December 8 raid, and had been told by Farwell
that [FBI infiltrator] Cotton Smith was to be Tackwood's contact.
Since Smith's testimony was crucial to the State's case, Tackwood's
exposure of Smith's real role was a devastating blow to the prosecution.
105

One consequence of this revelation was
that, after eleven days of deliberation, the jury returned acquittals
or failed to reach any verdict whatsoever relative to charges
of conspiring to assault and murder police officers brought against
all thirteen Panther defendants. Oddly, nine of the defendants,
including Pratt, were convicted of the relatively minor and technical
charge of conspiring to possess illegal weapons. 106 In addition:

In order for the armed police assault
on the Panther headquarters to have been justified, the police
contention that the Panthers had fired on them first would have
had to have been true, in which case at least some of the Panthers
would have been guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and assault
charges ... The failure of the jury to return guilty verdicts
on these charges represented a total repudiation of the CCS [and
FBI] "conspiracy" theory that led to the raids on December
8. 107

On December 18, 1968, two black men robbed
and shot a white couple, Caroline and Kenneth Olsen, on a Santa
Monica, California tennis court. Caroline Olsen died one week
later.

Pratt was accused of "the tennis
court murder" in a letter dated August 10, 1969, addressed
to LAPD Sergeant Duwayne Rice by an "underworld informant"
and marked "Do Not Open Except In Case of My Death."
Although the informant had not died, Rice opened and read the
accusation, and turned it over to CCS detective Ray Callahan for
presentation to a grand jury which secretly indicted Pratt.

The informant would later testify at trial
that Pratt, in direct personal conversation with him, had "bragged"
of the crime. He further testified that a .45 calibre Colt automatic
seized by the LAPD, belonging to Pratt but not ballistically matching
the tennis court murder weapon, was actually the gun in question,
Pratt having "changed the barrel" in order to alter
its ballistic pattern. A second informant, who did not testify,
corroborated this testimony. 108

The supposed informant corroboration testimony,
it was later revealed, was obtained from Cotton Smith, already
unmasked as an infiltrator/provocateur during the 1971 shootout
trial and thus unable to credibly take the stand in the Olsen
murder case. In 1985, Smith totally recanted his allegations against
Pratt, stating unequivocally that the former Panther leader had
been "framed," but by "the FBI rather than local
police"; he specifically named LA FBI COINTELPRO operative
George Aiken as having been instrumental in the affair. 109

Kenneth Olsen, the surviving victim, identified
Pratt as the murderer in open court, as did Barbara Reed, a shopkeeper
who had seen the gunmen prior to the shooting. Mitchell Lachman,
who had been near the tennis court on the evening of the murder,
testified the gunmen fled in a vehicle matching the description
of Pratt's white over red GTO convertible.

However, both Olsen and the District Attorney
omitted mention of the fact that he had positively identified
another man - Ronald Perkins - in a police lineup very shortly
after the fact, on December 24, 1968; they had similarly neglected
to mention that LAPD personnel had "worked with" Olsen
from photo spreads for some months prior to the trial, with an
eye toward obtaining the necessary ID of Pratt. 110 Again, both
the prosecutors and Mrs. Reed, the other witness who offered a
positive ID on Pratt, "forgot" comparable police coaching,
and all parties to the State's case somehow managed to overlook
the fact that both Olsen and Reed had repeatedly described both
gunmen as "clean shaven," while Pratt was known to have
worn a mustache and goatee for the entirety of his adult life.
111 This leaves Lachman's testimony that the assailants fled the
scene in a white-over-red convertible "like" (but not
necessarily) Pratt's; even if it were the same car, it was well
established - and never contested by the State - that virtually
the whole LA-BPP had use of the vehicle during the period in question.
112

Pratt's defense was that he was in Oakland,
some 400 miles north of Santa Monica, attending a BPP national
leadership meeting on the evening in question. Presentation of
this alibi was, however, severely hampered by the refusal of many
of those also in attendance - such as David, June, and Pat Hilliard,
Bobby and John Seale, Nathan Hare, Rosemary Gross and Brenda Presley
(all of the Newton faction) - to testify on his behalf. 113 Kathleen
Cleaver, also in attendance at the meeting, did testify that Pratt
was in Oakland from December 13-25, 1968, but even her efforts
to do so had been hampered by COINTELPRO letters to her husband
"explaining" that it was "too dangerous" for
her to return to the United States during the trial. 114 With
the weight of testimony heavily on the side of the prosecution,
Pratt was convicted of first degree murder on July 28, 1972 and
sentenced to seven years to life. 115

There were other problems with the case
which went beyond Pratt's inability to assemble defense witnesses.
For instance, it did occur to the defense that if the FBI were
tapping the phones of the BPP national offices in Oakland during
December of 1968 - as seems likely - the Bureau itself might well
be able to substantiate Pratt's whereabouts on the crucial night.
The FBI, however, submitted at trial that no such taps or bugs
existed, an assertion which was later shown to be untrue. 116

The Bureau then refused to release its
logs from the wiretaps, on "national security" grounds,
until forced to do so by an FOIA suit brought by attorneys Jonathan
Lubell, Mary O'Melveny and William H. O'Brien. 117 At that point
(1981), the transcripts were delivered, minus precisely the records
covering the period of time which might serve to establish Pratt's
innocence; "The FBI has indicated that the transcripts of
the conversations recorded by these telephone taps have been lost
or destroyed," wrote the frustrated judge. 118

The State's star witness, who first accused
Pratt of the tennis court murder in his letter to Rice, testified
to Pratt's "confession" of the crime (i.e., "bragging")
and finally reconciled the prosecution's ballistics difficulties,
was none other than the infiltrator/provocateur, expelled from
the BPP by Pratt, Julius C. (aka Julio) Butler. At the trial,
the prosecution went considerably out of its way to bolster Butler's
credibility before the jury by "establishing" that the
witness was not a paid FBI informant:

Q: And when you were working for the Black
Panther Party, were you also working for law enforcement at the
same time?

A: No.

Q: You had severed any ties you had with
law enforcement?

A: That's correct.

Q: Have you at any time since leaving
the Sheriffs Department worked for the FBI or the CIA?

A: No.

Q: Are you now working for the FBI or
CIA?

A: No.

This testimony was entered despite the
fact that Los Angeles FBI Field Office informant reports concerning
one Julius Carl Butler show he performed exactly this function,
at least during the period beginning in August of 1969 (the time
when he ostensibly made his initial accusation against Pratt)
until January 20, 1970 (after Pratt was jailed without bond on
the Olsen murder charge). During the whole of 1970, he filed monthly
reports with the Bureau, he was "evaluated" by the FBI
as an informant during that year, and his informant file was not
closed until May of 1972 - immediately prior to his going on the
witness stand. 119

Louis Tackwood has consistently contended
that Butler was an FBI infiltrator of the BPP from the day he
joined the Party in early 1968 and that he actively worked with
CCS detectives Ray Callahan and Daniel P. Mahoney to eliminate
Pratt. 120

At the trial, the Bureau also submitted
that Pratt was not the target of COINTELPRO activity; several
hundred documents subsequently released under the FOIA demonstrate
this to have been categorically untrue. Further:

On 18 December 1979, eight years after
Pratt's trial, the California Attorney-General's office filed
a declaration in court that his defense camp had been infiltrated
by one FBI informant. The Deputy Attorney-General wrote to the
court and defense counsel on 28 July 1980, enclosing a copy of
a letter of the same date from the Executive Assistant Director
of the FBI. This letter revealed that two had been in a position
to obtain information about Elmer Pratt's defense strategy. 121

One reason for the seemingly blanket recalcitrance
of the authorities - federal, state and local - in extending even
the most elementary pretense of justice in the Pratt case may
revolve around his quiet refusal to abandon the political principles
which caused him to become a COINTELPRO target in the first place.
Whatever the particulars of official motivation in the handling
of the Pratt case, it must be assessed within the overall COINTELPRO-BPP
context, especially a counterintelligence-related instructional
memo, dated October 24, 1968, and sent by Bureau headquarters
to all field offices. It reads in part:

Successful prosecution is the best deterrent
to such unlawful activities [as dissident political organizing].
Intensive investigations of key activists ... are logically expected
to result in prosecutions under substantive violation within the
Bureau's jurisdiction. 122

To this, the Church Committee's rejoinder
in its investigation of the Bureau's COINTELPRO illegalities still
seems quite appropriate: "While the FBI considered Federal
prosecution a 'logical' result, it should be noted that key activists
were chosen not because they were suspected of having committed
or planning [sic] to commit any specific Federal crime."
123 After 27 years in prison and five habeus corpus motions, the
conviction for the tennis court murder was finally vacated and
Geronimo ji Jaga was released.

Dhoruba Bin Wahad

In 1966, the New York City Police Department
commenced its own investigation of the Black Panther Party. Detective
Ralph White of the New York City Police Department was directed
to infiltrate the Black Panther Party and submit daily reports
on the Party and its members. The NYPD regularly communicated
with police departments throughout the country, sharing information
on the BPP, its members and activities.

The NYPD was also working with the FBI
on a daily basis. On August 29, 1968 FBI Special Agent Henry Naehle
reported on his meeting with a member of an NYPD "Special
Unit" investigating the BPP. SA Naehle acknowledged that
the FBIís New York Field Office (NYO) "has been working
closely with BSS in exchanging information of mutual interest
and to our mutual advantage."

An FBI "Inspectorís Review"
for the first quarter of 1969 shows that the NYPD, in conjunction
with the FBI, had an "interview" and "arrest"
program as part of their campaign to neutralize and disrupt the
BPP. The NYPD advised the FBI that

these programs have severely hampered
and disrupted the BPP, particularly in Brooklyn, New York, where,
for a while, BPP operations were at a complete standstill and
in fact have never recovered sufficiently to operate effectively.

A series of FBI documents reveal a joint
FBI/NYPD plan to gather information on BPP members and their supporters
in late 1968. During an unprovoked attack by off-duty members
of the NYPD on BPP members attending a court appearance in Brooklyn,
the briefcase of BPP leader David Brothers was stolen by the NYPD
and its contents photocopied and given to the FBI. Rather than
seeking to prosecute the police officers for this theft, the FBI
ordered "a review of these names and telephone numbers [so
that] appropriate action will be taken."

That "appropriate action" included
an effort to label Brothers and two other BPP leaders, Jorge Aponte
and Robert Collier, as police informants. On December 12, 1968,
the FBIís New York Office proposed circulating flyers warning
the community of the "DANGER" posed by Brothers, Collier
and Aponte. The NYO proposed that the flyers "be left in
restaurants where Negroes are known to frequent (Chock Full of
Nuts, etc.)" BSS later told the FBI that its proposal was
successful in that David Brothers had come under suspicion by
the BPP. An FBI memorandum dated December 2, 1968 captioned "Counterintelligence
Program" lists several operations during the previous two-week
period. It closes by stating that "every effort is being
made in the NYO to misdirect the operations of the BPP on a daily
basis."

In August 1968, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, then
known as Richard Dhoruba Moore, joined the BPP, and within a few
months was promoted to a position of leadership. He was soon identified
by the Bureau and by the NYPD as a "key agitator" and
placed in the FBI's "Security Index", "Agitator
Index," and "Black Nationalist Photograph Album."
FBI supervisors instructed the NYO to "develop better liaison
and closer working relationship with the NYCPD" in their
investigation of Dhoruba Bin Wahad.

On April 2, 1969 Bin Wahad and 20 other
members of the Black Panther Party were indicted on charges of
conspiracy in the so-called "Panther 21" case. A NYPD
memorandum notes that the Panther 21 arrests were considered a
"summation" of the overt and covert investigation commenced
in 1966. In a bi-weekly report to FBI Headquarters listing several
counterintelligence operations the FBI reported that

To date, the NYO has conducted over 500
interviews with BPP members and sympathizers. Additionally, arrests
of BPP members have been made by Bureau Agents and the NYCPD.
These interviews and arrests have helped disrupt and cripple the
activities of the BPP in the NYC area. Every effort will be made
to continue pressure on the BPP...

In July 1969, the NYPD sent officers to
Oakland, California to monitor the Black Panther Partyís
nationwide conference calling for community control of police
departments. An NYPD memorandum candidly acknowledged that community
control of the police, "may not be in the interests of the
department."

Through its warrantless wiretaps of BPP
telephones, the FBI learned that the BPP was trying to raise the
$100,000 bail that had been set for Bin Wahad, whose release was
considered by the BPP to be a priority over the other 20 defendants,
due to his leadership role in the organization. Fundraising efforts
were impeded by FBI/NYPD counterintelligence operations. For example,
following a fund raiser at the home of conductor Leonard Bernstein,
the FBI sent falsified letters to those in attendance in order
to "thwart the aims and efforts of the BPP in their attempt
to solicit money from socially prominent groups..." Unable
to raise bail, Dhoruba Bin Wahad spent the next year incarcerated.

The FBI continued to target BPP community
programs. For example, the FBI pressured several churches not
to institute the BPPís Free Breakfast for Children Program
at their parishes. In September, 1969, an NYPD BSS representative
told the FBI that the BPP was disintegrating in New York.

By March of 1970, the BPP had raised enough
money to post bail for the most articulate leaders and chose Mr.
Bin Wahad for release. The FBI ordered that he be immediately
and continuously surveilled and that donors of bail money be identified.
Director Hoover reminded his New York Office that the activities
of Panther 21 defendants were of "vital interest" to
the "Seat of Government".

Through their warrantless wiretaps of
BPP offices and residences, the FBI became aware in May 1970 of
dissatisfaction among New York BPP members, including Bin Wahad,
with West Coast BPP members. A COINTELPRO operation prepared by
the New Haven Field Office and submitted to the FBIís New
York Office consisted of an FBI-fabricated note wherein Bin Wahad
accused BPP leader Robert Bay of being an informant.

This successful operation resulted in
Dhoruba Bin Wahad's demotion within the BPP. Aware of his disillusionment,
the FBI disseminated information regarding BPP strife to the media
and participated in a plan to either recruit Bin Wahad as an informant
or have BPP members believe he was an agent for the FBI.

In August 1970, BPP leader Huey P. Newton
was released from prison. A plethora of counterintelligence actions
followed which sought to make Newton suspicious of fellow BPP
members, particularly those, like the Bin Wahad, who were on the
East Coast.

By early 1971, the plan bore fruit. On
January 28, 1971, FBI Director Hoover reported that Newton had
become increasingly paranoid and had expelled several loyal BPP
members:

Newton responds violently...The Bureau
feels that this near hysterical reaction by the egotistical Newton
is triggered by any criticism of his activities, policies or leadership
qualities and some of this criticism undoubtedly is result of
our counterintelligence projects now in operation.

This operation was enormously successful,
resulting in a split within the BPP with violent repercussions.
In early January 1971, Fred Bennett, a BPP member affiliated with
the New York chapter, was shot and killed, allegedly by Newton
supporters. Newton came to believe that Bin Wahad was plotting
to kill him. Bin Wahad, in turn, was told by Connie Matthews,
Newtonís secretary, that Newton was planning to have Bin
Wahad and Panther 21 co-defendants Edward Joseph and Michael Tabor
killed during Newtonís upcoming East Coast speaking tour.
As a result of the split and fearing for his life, Bin Wahad,
along with Tabor and Joseph, were forced to flee during the Panther
21 trial.

On May 13, 1971, the Panther 21, including
Dhoruba Bin Wahad, were acquitted of all charges in the less than
one hour of jury deliberations, following what was at that time
the longest trial in New York City history. BSS Detective Edwin
Cooper begrudgingly reported to defendant Michael Codd that the
case "was not proven to the juryís satisfaction."
Alarmed and embarrassed by the acquittal, Director Hoover ordered
an "intensification" of the investigations of acquitted
Panther 21 members with special emphasis on those, like Bin Wahad,
who were fugitives.

On May 19, 1971, NYPD Officers Thomas
Curry and Nicholas Binetti were shot on Riverside Drive in Manhattan.
Two nights later, two other officers, Waverly Jones and Joseph
Piagentini, were shot and killed in Harlem. In separate communiques
delivered to the media, the Black Liberation Army claimed responsibility
for both attacks.

Immediately after these shootings, the
FBI made the investigation of these incidents, called "Newkill,"
a part of their long-standing program against the BPP. Before
any evidence had been collected, BPP members, in particular those
acquitted in the Panther 21 case, were targeted as suspects. Hoover
instructed the New York Office to

consider [the] possibility that both attacks
may be result of revenge taken against NYC police by the Black
Panther Party (BPP) as a result of its arrest of BPP members in
April, 1969 [i.e. the Panther 21 case].

On May 26, 1971, J. Edgar Hoover met with
then President Richard Nixon who told Hoover that he wanted to
make sure that the FBI did not "pull any punches in going
all out in gathering information...on the situation in New York."
Hoover informed his subordinates that Nixon's interest and the
FBI's involvement were to be kept strictly confidential.

"Newkill" was a joint FBI/NYPD
operation involving total cooperation and sharing of information.
The FBI made all its facilities and resources, including its laboratory,
available to the NYPD. In turn, NYPD Chief of Detectives Albert
Seedman, who coordinated the NYPD's investigation, ordered his
subordinates to give the FBI "all available information developed
to date, as well as in future investigations."

On June 5, 1971, Bin Wahad was arrested
during a robbery of a Bronx after hours "social club",
a hangout for local drug merchants. Seized from inside the social
club was a .45 caliber machine gun. Although the initial ballistics
test on the weapon failed to link it with the Curry-Binetti shooting,
the NYPD publicly declared they had seized the weapon used in
May 19. The NYPD now had in custody a well-known and vocal Black
Panther leader and the alleged weapon linked to a police shooting.
His prosecution and conviction would both neutralize an effective
leader and justify the failed Panther 21 case. But there was no
direct evidence linking Bin Wahad to the shooting.

Pauline Joseph, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic,
became the prosecutionís star witness. Ms. Joseph first
surfaced when she made a phone call to the NYPD on June 12, 1971,
supplying her name and address and stating that Bin Wahad and
Edward Joseph (a Panther 21 defendant who jumped bail with Bin
Wahad) were innocent of the Curry-Binetti shooting. She told the
police that Bin Wahad "did not do it, either the Riverside
Drive [Curry-Binetti] shooting or the 32nd precinct [Piagentini-Jones]
shooting..."

The first person to arrive at Ms. Josephís
apartment was NYPD Lieutenant Kenneth Sauer, the head of the 24th
precinct detective squad. Contrary to her testimony at trial,
Ms. Joseph continued to maintain that Bin Wahad was innocent of
the Curry-Binetti shooting. Later that day she was interviewed
by BSS Detective Edwin Cooper. Joseph repeated that Bin Wahad
was innocent.

Ms. Joseph was arrested, and committed
as a material witness. For nearly two years she remained in the
exclusive custody of the New York County District Attorneyís
Office. She was repeatedly interviewed by state and federal authorities.

Ms. Joseph, while in the custody of the
District Attorney, was recruited as a "racial informant"
for the FBI. She was paid for her services and housed first in
a hotel and then in a furnished apartment, paid for by the District
Attorney. Pauline Joseph, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic,
became the prosecutionís star witness in the case.

Dhoruba Bin Wahad was indicted for the
attempted murder of Officers Curry and Binetti on July 30, 1971.
Although the NYPD and FBI continuously interviewed Ms. Joseph,
and prepared written memoranda of those interviews, the Assistant
District Attorney represented that, except for a one paragraph
statement made on the night of her commitment and her grand jury
testimony, there were no prior statements. The text of Ms. Josephís
initial phone call was withheld by the prosecution through two
trials. No notes of memoranda of the initial, exculpatory interviews
by Lieutenant Sauer and Detective Cooper were ever provided to
Bin Wahad. Neither were reports of subsequent interiews during
the two years she was in custody. After three trials, Dhoruba
Bin Wahad was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced by Justice
Martinisto to the maximum penalty, 25 years to life.

In December 1975, after learning of Congressional
hearings which disclosed the FBI's covert operations against the
BPP, Dhoruba Bin Wahad filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court,
charging that he had been the victim of numerous illegal and unconstitutional
actions designed to "neutralize" him, including the
frame-up in the Curry-Binetti case.

In 1980, the FBI and NYPD were ordered
by the Court to produce their massive files on Mr. Bin Wahad and
the BPP, that they had claimed did not exist. The FBI and NYPD
documents revealed that Mr. Bin Wahad was indeed a target of FBI/NYPD
covert operations and, for the first time, depicted the FBI's
intimate involvement in the Curry-Binetti investigation. The "Newkill"
file, which was finally produced in unredacted form in 1987, after
12 years of litigation, contains numerous reports which should
have been provided to Dhoruba Bin Wahad during his trial.

In a decision announced December 20, 1992,
Justice Bruce Allen of the New York State Supreme Court ordered
a new trial. The court exhaustively analyzed the prosecutionís
circumstantial case, particularly the testimony of Pauline Joseph.
The court found that the inconsistencies and omissions in the
prior statements contradicted testimony "crucial to establishing
the Peopleís theory of the case". The inconsistencies,
said the Court "went beyond mere details" and involve
"what one would expect to have been the most memorable aspects
of [the night of the shooting]". On January 19, 1995, the
District Attorney moved to dismiss the indictment, acknowledging
that they could not prove their case. The indictment was dismissed.
After more than 20 years in prison, Mr. Bin Wahad is at liberty
today, residing in Accra, Ghana.

The COINTELPRO off-shoot "Newkill"
and later "Chesrob" (an FBI acronym named after Assata
Shakur, aka Joanne Chesimard) had other targets as well. Members
of the Black Panther Party forced underground by Cointelpro-instigated
violence were hunted down by local and federal law enforcement
officials. In the three years after the 1971 BPP split, BPP members,
Harold Russsel, Woody Green, Twyman Meyers and Zayd Shakur were
killed during confrontations with law enforcement. Others were
captured and charged with crimes. All were tried at a time when
the public (and juries) knew nothing of COINTELPRO. During these
trials, as in the trials of Dhoruba Bin Wahad and Geronimo Pratt,
exculpatory evidence was withheld and other violations of the
United States Constitution were committed. However, post-conviction
motions on behalf of these former BPP members were unsuccessful
and they remain in prison today. They include Anthony Jalil Bottom,
Herman Bell, Robert Seth Hayes, Sundiata Acoli, Abdul Majid and
Bashir Hameed. Two of these former BPP members died while in prison:
Albert Nuh Washington in 2000 and Teddy Jah Heath in 2001. Both
spent over 25 years in prison but were denied compassionate release
even in their last days.

Marshall Eddie Conway

In 1970, Marshall Eddie Conway was Minister
of Defense of the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party.
He was also employed by the United States Postal Service. Unbeknownst
to Conway, some of the founding members of the Baltimore chapter
were undercover officers with the Baltimore Police Department,
who reported daily on his activities in the chapter. At the same
time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began its own investigation
of Conway, recording his whereabouts, contacting his employers
at the Post Office and maintaining "liaison" with the
Baltimore Police Department.

On April 23, 1970, a Baltimore Police
officer was shot and killed. Later that night, another officer
named Nolan was fired upon by an unapprehended Black male. Two
men arrested at the scene of the first shooting were allegedly
associates of members of the Baltimore BPP chapter. Because of
this, the police attributed both incidents to the BPP. Not surprisingly,
Nolan then claimed that a picture of Conway, a well-known BPP
member, resembled the unapprehended shooter. The next day, Conway
was arrested while working at the Post office. He was charged
with both the homicide and the attempted homicide of Nolan. Conway
was held without bail.

Conway petitioned the court to have either
Charles Garry or William Kunstler, two attorneys who consistently
represented party members, represent him at his trial. Although
both offered their services free of charge, the court denied Conwayís
request. Instead, a lawyer was appointed who performed no pre-trial
investigation and never met with Conway. Deprived of his rights,
Conway chose to absent himself from much of his January, 1971
trial.

But the stateís case, relying solely
upon Nolanís equivocal and highly suspect photo identification,
was shaky. To buttress their case, the state called one Charles
Reynolds, a known jailhouse informant. He ultimately testified
that while he shared a cell with Conway pre-trial, Conway made
admissions to him. In fact, as was verified by the court transcript,
Conway loudly objected when Reynolds was placed in his cell because
everyone knew he was an informant. Reynolds, who was a fugitive
from Michigan, was promised release if he testified. When the
trial was over, he got his wish.

Represented by inadequate counsel and
tried at a time when the existence of COINTELPRO was not known,
Conway was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. All appeals
have been denied and he has been denied parole, as are all "lifers"
in the State if Maryland. He has now been incarcerated for over
31 years and is probably the longest held political prisoner in
the United States, if not the world.

Justice Hangs in the Balance

Although COINTELPRO was first exposed
during the Watergate period, and incomparably more serious than
anything charged against Nixon, it was virtually ignored by the
national press and journals of opinion. A review of these programs
demonstrates the relative insignificance of the charges raised
against Nixon and his associates, specifically, the charges presented
in the Congressional Articles of Impeachment. 124

In the early 1970s, there occurred a seemingly
endless series of revelations about governmental transgressions.
A "credibility gap" was engendered by the federal executive
branch having been caught lying too many times, too red-handedly
and over too many years in its efforts to dupe the public into
supporting the U.S. war in Southeast Asia. This had reached epic
proportions when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the "Pentagon Papers,"
a highly secret government documentary history of official duplicity
by which America had become embroiled in Indochina, and caused
particularly sensitive excerpts to be published in the New York
Times. 125

Then on March 8, 1971, a group calling
itself the Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI, broke
into an FBI office in a small town called Media, Pennsylvania.
They subjected the FBI to what the FBI has been habitually subjecting
political dissidents to throughout the course of its history.
That is, in Bureau parlance, a black bag job. The information
they obtained was widely distributed through left and peace movement
channels, and summarized the following week in the Washington
Post. 126

An analysis of the documents in this FBI
office revealed that 1 percent were devoted to organized crime,
mostly gambling; 30 percent were "manuals, routine forms,
and similar procedural matter"; 40 percent were devoted to
political surveillance and the like, including two cases involving
right-wing groups, ten concerning immigrants, and over 200 on
left or liberal groups. Another 14 percent of the documents concerned
draft resistance and "leaving the military without government
permission." The remainder - only 15% - concerned bank robberies,
murder, rape, and interstate theft. 127

One year later, the political scandal
known as Watergate began to unravel, when five men were arrested
for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National
Committee, located in the Watergate apartment and office complex
in Washington, D.C. It was soon discovered that one of the men
was employed by the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP or
CREEP) and that the break-in had been planned by two others with
close ties to the White House.

In this peculiar and potentially volatile
set of circumstances, a government-wide effort was undertaken
to convince the public that its institutions were fundamentally
sound, albeit in need of fine-tuning and a bit of housecleaning.
It was immediately announced that U.S. ground forces would be
withdrawn from Vietnam as rapidly as possible. Televised congressional
hearings were staged to "get to the bottom of Watergate,"
a spectacle which soon led to the resignations of a number of
Nixon officials, the brief imprisonment of a few of them, and
the eventual resignation of the president himself.

The ousting of Richard Nixon for his misdeeds
on August 9, 1974 was described in the nation's press as "a
stunning vindication of our constitutional system." 129 Yet
the Watergate affair -- allegedly the media's finest hour -- merely
demonstrated their continued subservience to power and official
ideology. Until the dust had settled over Watergate, there was
virtually no mention of the government programs of violence and
disruption or comment concerning them, and even after the Watergate
affair was successfully concluded, there has been only occasional
discussion.

Beginning in 1974, the Senate held hearings
to investigate COINTELPRO and other intelligence agency abuses.
No other congressional investigation into these types of matters
has been so extensive, either before or since.

The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly known
as the Church committee, after Chairman Frank Church, produced
a extensive series of reports entitled, "Intelligence Activities
and the Rights of Americans," encompassing not only COINTELPRO,
but also a wide variety of other subjects, including electronic
surveillance by the National Security Agency, domestic CIA mail
opening programs, the misuse of the IRS, the assassination of
President Kennedy, covert actions abroad, assassination plots
involving foreign leaders, and various topics related to military
intelligence.

The Church committee found that COINTELPRO,
presumably set up to protect national security and prevent violence,
actually engaged in other actions "which had no conceivable
rational relationship to either national security or violent activity.
The unexpressed major premise of much of COINTELPRO is that the
Bureau has a role in maintaining the existing social order, and
that its efforts should be aimed toward combating those who threaten
that order."

This meant that the Bureau would take
actions against individuals and organizations simply because they
were critical of government policy. The Church committee report
gives examples of such actions, violations of the right of free
speech and association, where the FBI targeted people because
they opposed U.S. foreign policy, or criticized the Chicago police
actions at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The documents
assembled by the Church committee "compel the conclusion
that Federal law enforcement officers looked upon themselves as
guardians of the status quo" and cite the surveillance and
harassment of Martin Luther King Jr. as an example of this.

With regard to COINTELPRO, the Church
committee's report was based, it says, on a staff study of more
than 20,000 pages of Bureau documents, and included depositions
of many of the Bureau agents involved in the programs. The FBI
eventually acknowledged having conducted 2,218 separate COINTELPRO
actions from mid-1956 through mid-1974. These, the bureau conceded,
were undertaken in conjunction with other significant illegalities:
2,305 warrantless telephone taps, 697 buggings, and the opening
of 57,846 pieces of mail. 130 This itemization, although an indicator
of the magnitude and extent of FBI criminality, was far from complete.
The counterintelligence campaign against the Puerto Rican independence
movement was not mentioned at all, while whole categories of operational
techniques - assassinations, for example, and obtaining false
convictions against key activists - were not divulged with respect
to the rest. There is solid evidence that other sorts of illegality
were downplayed as well.

The FBI's quid pro quo for cooperating
in this charade seems to have been that none of its agents would
actually see the inside of a prison as a result of the "excesses"
thereby revealed. 131 The result was that

"The Justice Department has decided
not to prosecute anyone in connection with the Federal Bureau
of Investigation's 15-year campaign to disrupt the activities
of suspected subversive organizations." 132

J. Stanley Pottinger, head of the Civil
Rights Division, reported to the attorney general that he had
found "no basis for criminal charges against any particular
individuals involving particular incidents." The director
of the FBI also made clear that he saw nothing particularly serious
in the revelations of the Church and Pike Committees. There is
as yet no public record or evidence of any systematic investigation
of these practices. The press paid little heed to the record that
was being exposed during the Watergate period and even since has
generally ignored the more serious cases and failed to present
anything remotely resembling an accurate picture of the full record
and what it implies.

The object of all this muscle-flexing
was, of course, to create a perception that congress had finally
gotten tough, placing itself in a position to administer appropriate
oversight of the FBI. It followed that citizens had no further
reason to worry over what the Bureau was doing at that very moment,
or what it might do in the future.

In 1975 the Senate Select Committee concluded
that in order to complete its (re)building of the required public
impression, it might be necessary to risk going beyond exploration
of the Bureau's past counterintelligence practices and explore
ongoing (i.e.: ostensibly post-COINTELPRO) FBI conduct vis a vis
political activists. Specifically at issue in this connection
was what was even then being done to the American Indian Movement,
and hearings were scheduled to begin in July. But this is where
the Bureau, which had been reluctantly going along up to that
point, drew the line. The hearings never happened. Instead, they
were "indefinitely postponed" in late June of 1975,
at the direct request of the FBI. 133

The Church committee cites the testimony
of FBI director Clarence M. Kelley as indication that even after
the official end of COINTELPRO, "faced with sufficient threat,
covert disruption is justified." 134

The Legacy of COINTELPRO

The repression of dissident groups can
be traced far back into US history, at least to the passage of
the Alien and Sedition Acts, by which "the Federalists sought
to suppress political opposition and to stamp out lingering sympathy
for the principles of the French Revolution," or to the judicial
murder of four anarchists for "having advocated doctrines"
which allegedly lay behind the explosion of a bomb in Chicago's
Haymarket Square after a striker had been killed by police in
May 1886. 135 The Pinkerton Detective Agency, a private investigating
agency of the ninteenth century, made extensive use of informants,
strike-breakers and provocateurs.

During the first World War, when the long-time,
powerful head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover led the Bureau of Investigation,
there was a "mass deprivation of rights incident to the deserter
and selective service violator raids in New York and New Jersey
in 1918..." 136 What happened is that 35 Bureau Agents assisted
by police and military personnel and a "citizens auxiliary"
of the Bureau, "rounded up some 50,000 men without warrants
of sufficient probable cause for arrest."

In 1920 the Bureau, along with Immigration
Bureau agents, carried on the "Palmer Raids" (authorized
by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer), which, in 33 cities rounded
up 10,000 persons. The Church Committee report 137 talks of "the
abuses of due process of law incident to the raids," quoting
a scholarly study 138 that these raids involved "indiscriminate
arrests of the innocent with the guilty, unlawful seizures by
federal detectives..." and other violations of constitutional
rights.

The Church Committee cites a report of
distinguished legal scholars 139 made after the Palmer Raids,
and says the scholars "found federal agents guilty of using
third-degree tortures, making illegal searches and arrests, using
agents provocateurs...."

Attorney General Palmer justified his
actions "to clean up the country almost unaided by any virile
legislation" on grounds of the failure of Congress "to
stamp out these seditious societies in their open defiance of
law by various forms of propaganda":

Upon these two basic certainties, first
that the "Reds" were criminal aliens, and secondly that
the American Government must prevent crime, it was decided that
there could be no nice distinctions drawn between the theoretical
ideals of the radicals and their actual violations of our national
laws. Palmer's "information showed that communism in this
country was an organization of thousands of aliens, who were direct
allies of Trotzky." Thus "the Government is now sweeping
the nation clean of such alien filth," with the overwhelming
support of the press, until they perceived that their own interests
were threatened. 140

Elsewhere he described the prisoners as
follows:

Out of the sly and crafty eyes of many
of them leap cupidity, cruelty, insanity, and crime; from their
lopsided faces, sloping brows, and misshapen features may be recognized
the unmistakable criminal type.

Palmer's declared purpose was "to
tear out the radical seeds that have entangled American ideas
in their poisonous theories." 141

One early FBI target was Marcus Garvey,
founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Under
his leadership, UNIA, which to this day remains the largest organization
of African Americans ever assembled, devoted itself mainly to
the realization of various "bootstrapping" strategies
(i.e., undertaking business ventures as a means of attaining its
twin goals of black pride and self-sufficiency).

Nonetheless, despite UNIAs explicitly
capitalist orientation, or maybe because of it, Hoover launched
an inquiry into Garvey's activities in August 1919. When this
initial probe revealed no illegalities, Hoover, railing against
Garvey's "pro-Negroism," ordered that the investigation
be not only continued but intensified. UNIA was quickly infiltrated
by operatives recruited specifically for the purpose, and a number
of informants developed within it. Still, it was another two years
before the General Intelligence Division was able to find a pretext
- Garvey's technical violation of the laws governing offerings
of corporate stock - upon which to bring charges of "mail
fraud." Convicted in July 1923 by an all-white jury, the
UNIA leader was first incarcerated in the federal prison at Atlanta,
then deported as an undesirable alien in 1927. By then, the organization
he'd founded had disintegrated. Hoover, in the interim, had vowed
to prevent anyone from ever again assuming the standing of what
he called a "Negro Moses."

World War II brought a return of the FBI
to counterintelligence operations as President Franklin D. Roosevelt
issued a series of instructions establishing the basic domestic
intelligence structure for the federal government. Roosevelt was
advised by Hoover to proceed with the utmost degree of secrecy:

In considering the steps to be taken for
the expansion of the present structure of intelligence work, it
is believed imperative that it proceed with the utmost degree
of secrecy in order to avoid criticism or objections which might
be raised to such an expansion by either ill-informed persons
or individuals having some ulterior motive ... Consequently, it
would seem undesirable to seek any special legislation which would
draw attention to the fact that it was proposed to develop a special
counterespionage drive of any great magnitude. 142

According to William C. Sullivan, Hoover's
assistant for many years:

Such a very great man as Franklin D. Roosevelt
saw nothing wrong in asking the FBI to investigate those opposing
his lend-lease policy -- a purely political request. He also had
us look into the activities of others who opposed our entrance
into World War II, just as later Administrations had the FBI look
into those opposing the conflict in Vietnam. It was a political
request also when he [Roosevelt] instructed us to put a telephone
tap, a microphone, and a physical surveillance on an internationally
known leader in his Administration. It was done. The results he
wanted were secured and given to him. Certain records of this
kind ... were not then or later put into the regular FBI filing
system. Rather, they were deliberately kept out of it. 143

The passage in 1940 of the Smith Act,
made "sedition" a peacetime as well as a wartime offense.
The doctrine was laid out clearly by Supreme Court Justice Robert
H. Jackson in his opinion upholding of the Smith Act on the grounds
"that it was no violation of free speech to convict Communists
for conspiring to teach or advocate the forcible overthrow of
the government, even if no clear and present danger could be proved."
For if the clear and present danger test were applied, Jackson
argued, "it means that Communist plotting is protected during
its period of incubation; its preliminary stages of organization
and preparation are immune from the law, the Government can move
only after imminent action is manifest, when it would, of course,
be too late." Thus there must be "some legal formula
that will secure an existing order against revolutionary radicalism....
There is no constitutional right to `gang up' on the Government."
Opposition tendencies, however minuscule, must be nipped in the
bud prior to "imminent action."

Hoover claimed that in 1940, "advocates
of foreign isms" had succeeded in boring into every phase
of American life, masquerading behind front organizations. 144
In 1939, Hoover told the House Appropriations Committee that his
General Intelligence Division had compiled extensive indices of
individuals, groups, and organizations engaged in subversive activities,
in espionage activities, or any activities that are possibly detrimental
to the internal security of the United States.. . . Their backgrounds
and activities are known to the Bureau. These indexes will be
extremely important and valuable in a grave emergency. 145

After World War II, the FBI's attention
turned from fascism to communism. This was the beginning of the
Cold War. In March of 1946, Hoover informed Attorney General Tom
Clark that the FBI had

found it necessary to intensify its investigation
of Communist party activities and Soviet espionage cases and it
was taking steps to list all members of the Communist party and
any others who might be dangerous in the event of a break with
the Soviet Union, or other serious crisis involving the United
States and the USSR.. . . It might be necessary in a crisis to
immediately detain a large number of American citizens. 146

As for the Communist party, "ordinary
conspiracy principles" sufficed to charge any individual
associated with it "with responsibility for and participation
in all that makes up the Party's program" and "even
an individual," acting alone and apart from any "conspiracy,"
"cannot claim that the Constitution protects him in advocating
or teaching overthrow of government by force or violence."
147

In 1948, the Mundt-Nixon bill, calling
for the registration of the Communist party, was reported out
of Nixon's House Committee on Un-American Activities. Senate liberals
objected, and after a Truman veto they proposed as a substitute
"the ultimate weapon of repression: concentration camps to
intern potential troublemakers on the occasion of some loosely
defined future 'Internal Security Emergency'," 148 including,
as one case, "insurrection within the United States in aid
of a foreign enemy." 149

This substitute was advocated by Benton,
Douglas, Graham, Kefauver, Kilgore, Lehman, and Humphrey, then
a freshman senator. Humphrey later voted against the bill, though
he did not retreat from his concentration camp proposal. In fact,
he was concerned that the conference committee had brought back
"a weaker bill, not a bill to strike stronger blows at the
Communist menace, but weaker blows." The problem with the
new bill was that those interned in the detention centers would
have "the right of habeas corpus so they can be released
and go on to do their dirty business." 150

In 1949 the attorney general's list was
established, excluding members of "communist front organizations"
from federal employment, since their influence on government policies
would be such that those policies will either favor the foreign
country of their ideological choice or will weaken the United
States government domestically or abroad to the ultimate advantage
of the ... foreign power. Consequently, [Mr. Hoover] urged that
attention be given to the association of government employees
with front organizations. These included not only established
fronts but also temporary organizations, spontaneous campaigns,
and pressure movements so frequently used by subversive groups.
If a disloyal employee was affiliated with such fronts, he could
be expected to influence government policy in the direction taken
by the group. 151

The first formal COINTELPRO, aimed at
the U.S. Communist Party, commenced on August 28, 1956. Although
this was the first instance in which the Internal Security Branch
was instructed to employ the full range of extralegal techniques
developed by the bureau's counterintelligence specialists against
a domestic target in a centrally coordinated and programmatic
way, the FBI had conducted such operations against the CP and
to a lesser extent the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) on an ad
hoc basis at least as early as 1941.

Instructively, Hoover began at the same
time to include a section on "Negro Organizations" in
reports otherwise dedicated to "Communist Organizations"
and "Axis Fifth Columnists." In 1954 there was also
the Communist Control Act, a statute outlawing the CP and prohibiting
its members from holding certain types of employment.

Viewed against this backdrop, it is commonly
believed that, however misguided, COINTELPRO-CPUSA was in some
ways well intended, undertaken out of a genuine concern that the
CP was engaged in spying for the Soviet Union. Declassified FBI
documents, however, reveal quite the opposite. While espionage
and sabotage "potentials" are mentioned almost as afterthoughts
in the predicating memoranda, unabashedly political motives take
center stage. The objective of the COINTELPRO was, as Internal
Security Branch chief Alan Belmont put it at the time, to block
the CP's "penetration of specific channels of American life
where public opinion is molded" and to prevent thereby its
attaining "influence over the masses."

From the outset, considerable emphasis
was placed on intensifying the bureau's long-standing campaign
to promote factional disputes within the Party. To this end, the
CP was infiltrated more heavily than ever before. It has been
estimated that by 1965 approximately one-third of the CP's nominal
membership consisted of FBI infiltrators and paid informants,
while bona fide activists were systematically snitch jacketed.
A formal "Mass Media Program" was also created, "wherein
derogatory information on prominent radicals was leaked to the
news media."

The programs directed against the Communist
party continued through the 1960s, with such interesting innovations
as Operation Hoodwink from 1966 through mid-1968, designed to
incite organized crime against the Communist party through documents
fabricated by the FBI, evidently in the hope that criminal elements
would carry on the work of repression and disruption in their
own manner. 152

In October 1961, the "SWP Disruption
Program" was put into operation against the Socialist Workers
Party. The grounds offered, in a secret FBI memorandum, were the
following: the party had been "openly espousing its line
on a local and national basis through running candidates for public
office and strongly directing and/or supporting such causes as
Castro's Cuba and integration problems...in the South." The
SWP Disruption Program, put into operation during the Kennedy
administration, reveals very clearly the FBI's understanding of
its function: to block legal political activity that departs from
orthodoxy, to disrupt opposition to state policy, to undermine
the civil rights movement.

CISPES

The FBI has continued to violate the constitutional
rights of citizens through the 1980's, up to 1990, as revealed
by Ross Gelbspan in his book Break-Ins, Death Threats And The
FBI. Utilizing thousands of pages of FBI documents secured through
the Freedom of Information Act, Gelbspan found that activists
who opposed U.S. policy in Central America "experienced nearly
200 incidents of harassment and intimidation, many involving...break-ins
and thefts or rifling of files." Gelbspanís intent
was to "add a small document to the depressingly persistent
history of the FBI as a national political police force."

During the 1980's as the FBI waged an
"active measures" campaign against the Committee In
Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), a former FBI
informant, Frank Varelli, became disillusioned with the Bureau's
attempt to destroy CISPES. Acting on disinformation supplied by
the murderous Salvadoran National Guard, false information was
forwarded by the FBI to the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The National Guard claimed that one FMLN
coalition member, the Armed Revolutionary Group (GAR), "were
to promote in North America a strong and violent campaign of agitation
and propaganda on behalf of FMLN-FDR, having obtained immediate
support from different sectors of North American society. Among
the groups providing support were labor unions, Gay Power groups,
Pro- Abortion groups, groups involved in the women's liberation
movement, and organizations that are opposed to the strengthening
of the military forces of the US." 153

Although not a shred of evidence existed
linking these North American organizations to the GAR, the groups
were included in the National Guard communique -- at the direct
request of the FBI.

According to Varelli, "Can you imagine
if gay rights groups, abortion rights groups, the Equal Rights
Amendment groups were known to support a group that had killed
more than 20 police and soldiers in a year?" The informant
added, "Once the FBI had this data in their files, they could
proceed to investigate all these other groups. What is even worse,
the FBI knew that this material from the National Guard was strictly
disinformation. But they passed the same material along to the
Secret Service, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other agencies
in the intelligence community without alerting them to the fact
that it was completely fabricated." 154

The FBI found it "imperative to formulate
some plan of attack against CISPES," not because of its suspected
involvement in terrorism or any other criminal activity, but because
of its association with "individuals [deleted] who defiantly
display their contempt for the U.S. government by making speeches
and propagandizing their cause." In plain English, CISPES
was politically objectionable to the Bureau - no more, or less
- and was therefore deliberately targeted for repression. 155

The investigation was ultimately expanded
to include not only CISPES itself, but nearly 2000 organizations
and individuals with which CISPES had some sort of interactive
relations. This included pastors of local churches who were sympathetic
to the Salvadorean peasantry, and Duke University, which provided
meeting space.

The Bureau admits it paid Varelli from
1981 to 1984 to infiltrate CISPES. Varelli has testified that
the FBI's stated objective was to "break" CISPES. He
recounts a modus operandi straight out of the annals COINTELPRO
- from break-ins, bogus publications and disruption of public
events to planting guns on CISPES members and seducing CISPES
leaders in order to get blackmail photos for the FBI. 156

Alerted by Varelli's disclosures, the
Center for Constitutional Rights obtained a small portion of the
Bureau's CISPES files and released them to the press. The files
show the U.S. government targeting a very broad range of religious,
labor and community groups opposed to its Central America policies.
They confirm that the FBI's objective was to attack and "neutralize"
these groups. 157 Mainstream media coverage of these revelations
elicited a flurry of congressional investigations and hearings.
Publicly exposed, the FBI tried to scapegoat the whistle blower.
Its in-house investigation found Varelli "unreliable"
and held that his reports of CISPES terrorism were false. The
Bureau denied any violation of the constitutional rights of U.S.
citizens or involvement in the hundreds of break-ins reported
by Central America activists. A grand total of six agents received
"formal censure" and three were suspended for 14 days.
FBI Director William Sessions declared the case closed, a mere
"aberration" due to "failure in FBI management."
158

The Judi Bari Bombing

There is no better example than the Judi
Bari "boom and bust" case to show that the FBI kept
on well into the 1990s using covert action tactics against political
movements and activists which they perceived as threats to the
established order. One can make a case that the FBI is still using
such tactics in the Bari case in 2001.

The car bombing of Judi Bari and Darryl
Cherney on May 24, 1990 made headlines across the nation. At the
FBI's instigation, Oakland California police immediately arrested
the two nonviolent environmental leaders and told the media that
they were terrorists blown up by their own bomb. For the next
two months, the FBI and police held a series of press conferences
where they dribbled out false evidence of the pair's guilt to
feed a drumbeat of sensational media coverage.

But there was clear evidence that Bari
was targeted because of her leftist environmental and labor organizing.
Someone wanted to stop the two Northern California Earth First!
leaders, the organizers of Redwood Summer, the largest ever campaign
of nonviolent protests against corporate liquidation logging of
the redwoods.

After two months, the Alameda County District
Attorney declined to file any charges, citing lack of evidence
against the pair. There is evidence, though, from the FBI's own
files, that agents falsified evidence, suppressed exonerating
evidence, and conspired with Oakland police to frame the two bombing
victims. Moreover, the records show that the FBI stubbornly refused
to do a genuine investigation of the bombing, and failed to pursue
real evidence and leads turned over to them, such as fingerprints
or death threats Bari received.

Bari, the mother of two young daughters,
was nearly killed when the powerful motion-triggered pipe bomb
wrapped with nails for shrapnel effect blew up directly under
her driver's seat. The bomb caused horrifying maiming and crippling
injuries, leaving her with a paralyzed right foot and unending
pain for the rest of her life.

Bari and Cherney were on an organizing
tour for their campaign, which at first they called Mississippi
Summer in the Redwoods in homage to the civil rights movement
that inspired it. The idea was to have mass nonviolent civil disobedience
to delay the cutting of redwoods long enough to let voters decide
the issue in November 1990, when two statewide timber reform initiatives
would be on the ballot. The call went out to college students
across America: Come to Northern California and save the redwoods.

In the June 10, 1990 San Francisco Examiner,
writer Jane Kay raised the issue of law enforcement interest:

"Environmental activism is the new
target of political suspicion and surveillance, and law enforcement
agencies are stepping up action against those who demand radical
change. Calling them agitators, outsiders, the mafia and extremists,
local, state and federal investigators and prosecutors say they
suspect them of violent acts -- or the potential for them. They
have responded in the last year with arrests, searches, seizures
and questioning."

FBI files contained evidence of Bari and
Cherney's innocence, but not until three years after the bombing
did the FBI begin (grudgingly) to disclose that evidence, and
then only under court order and Congressional pressure. A year
after the bombing, with no progress in the official investigation,
and with the FBI still telling the media that there were no other
suspects but Bari and Cherney, the pair filed a federal civil
rights suit against the FBI and Oakland Police, charging them
with conspiring "to suppress, chill and 'neutralize' their
constitutionally protected activities in defense of the environment."

Now Bari and Cherney could investigate
the bombing themselves, using civil discovery and subpoena power
to compel the FBI and police to turn over files and evidence and
to submit to questioning under oath. Ten years later, their charges
are supported by over 20,000 pages of evidence, including FBI
files and the testimony of over 70 FBI agents and police officers.
The evidence of police misconduct is strong enough that the suit
has survived repeated motions by the FBI and Oakland to dismiss
it.

Bari and Cherney discovered that police
crime scene photos clearly showed that the bomb ripped a two foot
by four foot hole in the floorboard centered directly under the
driver's seat. FBI files revealed that a top explosives expert,
agent David R. Williams, inspected the bombed car three weeks
after the explosion and showed the local agents that the bomb
had been completely hidden under the driver's seat. He told them
the bomb was detonated by a motion trigger, and had functioned
as designed rather than exploding accidentally.

That put the lie to FBI statements that
the bomb was on the back seat floorboard where they would have
seen it -- the principal claim used to justify arresting Bari
and Cherney for possession and transportation of an explosive
device. Knowing full well from their own expert's testimony that
Bari and Cherney were innocent victims, the FBI and Oakland police
continued to lie to the media for another five weeks, saying they
had plenty of evidence they were the bombers.

Bari's last work in her life was to oversee
a crucial phase of her lawsuit so that her legal team could take
the case to trial on behalf of her children, to clear her name,
and to secure the rights of all activists to be free from FBI
interference with their constitutional rights. Although she died
of cancer on March 2, 1997, the suit is continued by Bari's estate
and Cherney.

Bari felt sure as soon as it happened
that timber interests were behind the bombing. She told investigating
officers in the hospital that she began receiving death threats
soon after she had announced plans for Redwood Summer. Police
found copies of written threats in her bombed car.

Perhaps the key incident that made her
the target of the bomb attack was her demand for government seizure
of timber corporation property. Bari appeared in a coalition with
Louisiana Pacific workers before an April 3, 1990 meeting of Mendocino
County's Board of Supervisors. LP had closed several sawmills
as the trees were used up, leaving many of their workers jobless.
Bari demanded that the county use eminent domain powers to seize
LP corporate timberlands and turn them over to the workers.

Her property seizure demand and her coalition
with disgruntled timber workers certainly focused negative timber
industry attention on Bari, and probably the FBI's too. A local
paper published a large front page photo of Bari from the board
meeting. A copy of that photo with the circle and cross hairs
of a rifle scope drawn over her face was the most frightening
death threat Bari received, she said. The photo was smeared with
excrement and stapled to the door of the Mendocino Environmental
Center along with a yellow ribbon, the symbol of timber industry
support groups opposed to Redwood Summer and Proposition 130,
the "Forests Forever" initiative on the November ballot.

If the "Forests Forever" initiative,
Prop. 130, had passed in the fall 1990 election, the three big
logging corporations of the redwood region -- Georgia Pacific,
Louisiana Pacific and Pacific Lumber -- would have lost billions
of dollars. It would have put an end to unsustainable liquidation
logging and clearcutting, and ended industry control over the
board that wrote timber regulations.

With an enormous financial motive to defeat
the initiative, the corporations hired the giant public relations
firm Hill & Knowlton to manage a PR campaign to turn public
opinion against the initiative. An important part of the campaign
was to derail Redwood Summer. It was drawing media attention to
the overlogging, which would work in favor of Prop.130.

There were many signs of an orchestrated
COINTELPRO-like campaign of harassment and intimidation against
Bari and other environmentalists in the weeks before the bombing.
Someone cooked up counterfeit EF! flyers and press releases calling
for violence and sabotage during Redwood Summer, and Pacific Lumber
and Louisiana Pacific knowingly distributed the fakes to workers,
community members and media in a move calculated to deceive people
about EF!'s nonviolent intentions and create an atmosphere of
hatred and violence toward environmentalists.

As the FBI and police smeared Bari, Cherney
and Earth First! as terrorists after the bombing, the PR company
quickly put out propaganda falsely labeling Prop. 130 "the
Earth First! initiative," and calling it "too extreme."
By some reports, they spent up to $20 million by the time voters
defeated the initiative by a narrow margin.

FBI records obtained through the Freedom
of Information Act show that the FBI infiltrated and spied on
Earth First! almost from its beginning in 1980, with the earliest
known FBI report on it dated 1981. Heavily censored FBI documents
obtained through Bari's suit indicate weekly meetings in spring
1990 between an FBI agent and a secret informant in Northern California.
Deposition testimony by Oakland Police Department officers and
FBI agents states the FBI had an informant on EF! leaders, and
the FBI told OPD that Cherney and Bari were already "the
subjects of an investigation in the terrorist field" when
they were bombed. They could have been under surveillance when
the bomb was placed.

Just before the Bari bombing, the FBI
was wrapping up "Operation Thermcon" in Arizona, a 3-year
covert operation employing over 50 FBI agents designed to entrap
and discredit EF! and its co-founder Dave Foreman as explosive-using
terrorists. The FBI infiltrated a tiny Arizona EF! group with
an undercover agent provocateur, won their trust over a couple
of years, and tried to persuade them to use thermite, an explosive
incendiary, to take down a power line. The activists refused the
FBI infiltrator's offer to provide explosives, and he settled
for providing them with a cutting torch instead. The FBI provocateur
provided the equipment, trained the activists in its use, chose
the target, drove them to the site, and joined an FBI strike team
in busting them in the act on May 31, 1989, almost a year to the
day before the Bari bombing. Foreman was not directly involved,
but was charged with conspiracy for providing $100 to the group.
The resulting "Arizona Five" trial ended in plea bargains
in August, 1991, with prison sentences for two of the activists,
and with probation and fines for the others, including Foreman.
Note that the Bari bombing came midway between the arrest and
the trial in the Thermcon case.

Thermcon was the FBI's code name meaning
"thermite conspiracy," but there was no thermite involved
except in the FBI scheme to tie EF! to explosives despite the
fact they have never advocated or used explosives in their entire
history. The FBI had a public relations goal in Thermcon, to deceive
the public into believing EF! were violent extremists so as to
neutralize their effectiveness and isolate them from public support.
It was a classic COINTELPRO against Earth First!

The true goal of Thermcon was revealed
when Michael Fain, the FBI's undercover agent provocateur in the
case, accidentally left his body wire running and recorded his
conversation with other agents. On the tape, Fain is heard to
say, "I don't really look for them to be doing a lot of hurting
people. (Foreman) isn't really the guy we need to pop -- I mean
in terms of an actual perpetrator. This is the guy we need to
pop to send a message. And that's all we're really doing. . .
. Uh-oh! We don't need that on tape! Hoo boy!" The FBI's
true goal was to "send a message" to the public that
Earth First! was a terrorist group.

Bari and Cherney's investigation turned
up several connections between the timber industry and the FBI,
including a chummy "Dear Bill" letter sent to FBI Director
William Sessions by a board member of Maxxam, which owns Pacific
Lumber.

Louisiana Pacific had an FBI connection
that directly involved bombs. One month before the Bari bombing,
the FBI conducted a bomb investigator school in Humboldt County.
FBI terrorist squad bomb expert Frank Doyle blew up cars with
pipe bombs on a Louisiana Pacific logging site, then his students
practiced investigating. Louisiana Pacific was the company whose
timberlands Bari asked the government to seize, after which she
immediately began receiving death threats.

There is the mystery of another bomb at
an LP sawmill in Cloverdale, California, about an hour's drive
south of Bari's home. Two weeks after the FBI bomb school (and
two weeks before Bari's car exploded), a partly-exploded firebomb
was found. That bomb, a pipe bomb next to a can of gasoline, failed
to fully explode or to ignite the gasoline. A cardboard sign near
the firebomb bore the words, "LP screws millworkers,"
a message that could be associated with Bari. A cardboard sign
next to a firebomb makes no sense, unless it was designed to fail
and to leave evidence that could be used to help to frame Bari
for the Oakland bomb two weeks later.

The FBI lab found that the Cloverdale
and Oakland bombs matched exactly in components and construction
method, and were built by the same person(s). This same type of
bomb was studied at the FBI bomb school two weeks earlier, according
to testimony of an Oakland officer who was there. Investigators
found a usable fingerprint on the cardboard sign, but there is
no record that the FBI ever tried to match the print to Bari or
Cherney, or to anyone else.

Less than an hour after the Oakland explosion,
none other than Special Agent Frank Doyle, the bomb school instructor,
took charge of the bomb scene investigation. There were at least
five of his bomb school students at the scene, and they were overheard
on a videotape joking about the scene being the "final exam."
Since he was the FBI's terrorist squad bomb expert and their instructor
the other FBI and Oakland bomb investigators who were at the scene
first deferred to his pronouncements about the evidence.

It was Doyle who overruled the Oakland
sergeant who got there first and said the bomb was under the driver's
seat and that he could see the pavement under the car through
the hole in the seat bottom. It was Doyle who falsely said the
bomb was on the floor behind the driver's seat where it would
have been easily seen. It was also Doyle who falsely claimed that
two bags of nails found in the back of Bari's car matched nails
taped to the bomb for shrapnel effect, when in fact they were
not even the same type, and were clearly different to the naked
eye. (Bari worked as a carpenter, and always had tools and nails
in the car.)

Other officers on the scene testified
that Doyle argued with them, and quoted him saying, "I've
been looking at bomb scenes for 20 years, and I'm looking at this
one, and I'm telling you you can rely on it. This bomb was visible
to the people who loaded the back seat of this car."

Exactly three weeks later, when Supervisory
Special Agent David R. Williams -- the FBI crime laboratory's
top explosives expert -- inspected the bombed car, he pointed
out to Doyle that impact marks left by the pipe bomb's end caps
on the transmission tunnel and driver's door, combined with the
location of the hole in the floorboard and the damage to the seat
cushion, clearly proved the bomb was under the driver's seat,
not in the back where Doyle had said.

Despite this early clear evidence that
Bari was the target of attempted murder, the FBI and Oakland PD
continued telling the media and the court that Bari and Cherney
were their only suspects, and fabricating other stories about
nails from the bomb matching nails found in Bari's house. Repetition
is a fundamental of the "Big Lie" propaganda technique,
maintaining a drumbeat of false information until it is accepted
by the media and the public as the truth. There can be no doubt
that the FBI was knowingly lying about the evidence.

M. Wesley Swearingen, a retired career
FBI agent with first-hand inside knowledge of COINTELPRO wrote
in his book "FBI Secrets -- An Agent's Expose:

"(COINTELPRO) is still in operation
today, but under a different code name. The operation is no longer
placed on paper where it can be discovered through the release
of documents under the Freedom of Information Act. Ö A clear
example of the FBI's continued COINTELPRO is in the FBI's alleged
involvement in the 1990 bombing of the vehicle occupied by Judi
Bari and Darryl Cherney ... which was an effort to neutralize
Judi Bari."

There could hardly have been a more ideal
location than Oakland for an FBI covert operation against Bari.
The media coverage of the Oakland bombing was far more extensive,
and was far more easily manipulated by the FBI, than if it had
happened in Mendocino or Humboldt Counties where Bari lived and
spent nearly all of her time. Oakland was the home of the Black
Panther Party for Self Defense, which bore the brunt of the most
extreme COINTELPRO of all, including multiple assassinations and
frame-ups of its leaders. The Oakland Police Department has a
long history of cooperating with the Bureau in targeting progressive
and radical groups.

In deposition in the Bari case, OPD intelligence
division chief Kevin Griswold admitted that his department keeps
files on over 300 political groups and individuals in the Bay
Area. Griswold said the Oakland Police have spied on EF! since
1984, and had their own informant inside EF! who reported back
to Griswold on plans for upcoming demonstrations. This even though
EF! is not based in Oakland and was not active there prior to
the Bari bombing. Griswold said he shares information from his
spies with the FBI. Encouraging and tapping into political spying
operations run by local police like Oakland's was one of the key
ways the FBI got around the Attorney General's guidelines that
barred the bureau from purely political spying.

The special agent in charge of the FBI's
San Francisco office at the time of the bombing was Richard W.
Held, a 26-year veteran of the FBI's COINTELPRO "dirty tricks"
campaigns against the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement
and Puerto Rican independence activists.

Under deposition under oath in the Bari
case, Held claimed he was unaware of the details of the Bari-Cherney
case, and implied that it was not important enough to merit his
attention. But files in the San Francisco FBI office contained
a memo from Washington ordering his office to provide weekly reports
on the Bari case so that headquarters could respond to the "numerous
inquiries" they were getting from the media. Held's testimony
was also contradicted by FBI agents under his command who said
in their depositions that they briefed him daily on the case.

The unraveling of the frame-up of Bari
and Cherney may have brought an early end to Held's 25-year FBI
career. It is a strong tradition in the FBI not to embarrass the
bureau. Held announced his early resignation from the FBI in May
of 1993, the day before Bari held a press conference with the
newly released Oakland Police crime scene photos exposing the
FBI lies about the location of the bomb. Held told reporters he
resigned because he expected reassignment to a new post and didn't
want to move his family. His father, Richard G. Held, had risen
to the high post of Deputy Director of the FBI, and Held's career
track was headed for the top as well. He told reporters his mother
cried when he told her he was resigning, so clearly Held's FBI
career was very important to him and his family, and it seems
unlikely he would end it early just to avoid a relocation.

Other cases have come to light where the
FBI allegedly used bombs to frame radicals twenty years before
the Bari bombing. FBI agent provocateur David Sannes was used
to get radicals in Seattle to use bombs so that they could be
arrested and discredited. When he learned that the FBI wanted
him to set up one bomber to die in a booby-trapped explosion,
he refused to go along and went public.

Sannes said in an interview on WBAI radio
"My own knowledge is that the FBI along with other Federal
law enforcement agencies has been involved in a campaign of bombing,
arson and terrorism in order to create in the mass public mind
a connection between political dissidence of whatever stripe and
revolutionaries of whatever violent tendencies."

Though the Seattle cases happened in the
early 1970s, just before the supposed termination of COINTELPRO,
the goal of the FBI's Operation Thermcon at the time of the Bari
bombing 20 years later was to connect well-known Earth First!
leaders with the use of explosives in the public mind, the same
FBI strategy Sannes exposed in the Seattle cases.

Until the Bari-Cherney suit finally has
its day in court, beginning October 1, 2001, many questions will
lie unanswered. But it seems more rational than paranoid to believe
there was an FBI and corporate timber connection to the bombing.
Both timber and the FBI had ample motives, history, means and
opportunity to bomb Bari. There are also FBI connections to both
Maxxam/Pacific Lumber and Louisiana Pacific -- even involving
bombs, in LP's case.

Big Timber's PR firm may have planned
the bombing and arranged the FBI cooperation in the frame-up,
but it meshed perfectly with the FBI's own Operation Thermcon
to neutralize Earth First! by trying to connect its best known
leaders to explosives, first Dave Foreman, then Judi Bari and
Darryl Cherney.

Judi Bari was the redwood timber industry's
most outspoken, brilliant, and effective opponent. The industry
would go to any length to defeat Prop. 130, because billions of
dollars were at stake. Framing Judi Bari for a bombing would serve
that goal. It would be used to demonize Earth First! as violent
extremists. Then voters could be turned against the initiative
by falsely linking it with Earth First!. And that's exactly what
they did.

The bombing was expertly planned, including
the Cloverdale sawmill bomb which the FBI immediately cited as
evidence of Bari's guilt in her own bombing. Both bombs were expertly
conceived and built, according to the FBI's top expert, and the
one in Bari's car functioned as designed. Because of that, Bari
believed the bombing was a professional hit.

The bombing happened in the midst of a
sophisticated psychological warfare blitz of disinformation, intimidation
and death threats, while Bari was organizing the biggest mass
demonstrations against corporate overlogging in history, while
she was taking on multi-billion dollar corporations and threatening
their bottom line, and while she was building a coalition between
timber workers and environmentalists by pointing to the corporations
as the problem. She had also led Earth First! in her region to
disavow tree-spiking and equipment sabotage, and insisted that
a strict non-violence code be adhered to during Redwood Summer.
The fact that Bari was an outspoken advocate of nonviolence gave
all the more sensational impact to framing her as a terrorist
bomber.

In depositions the FBI agents involved
in the Bari investigation admitted that they never found any evidence
whatsoever that she built the bomb that nearly killed her, or
any other bomb, But the FBI has never issued any statement of
exoneration or any apology. Not only has the FBI not retracted
their false charges, they continue to repeat them. Speaking to
students at an October 1999 Humboldt State University recruiting
event, FBI agent Candice DeLong told the students: "Judi
Bari was a terrorist. They were carrying that bomb." The
FBI recently spent $200,000 of the taxpayers' money paying a U.
S. Air Force laboratory to do simulation experiments aimed at
showing that the bomb could have been in the back seat of Bari's
car after all.

Regardless who bombed Bari, it is plainly
evident that FBI agents made a determined effort to frame her
for it. After years of delay by the FBI, Bari's civil rights suit
is set for trial beginning October 1, 2001 in federal court in
Oakland.